Remembering Meekal Ahmed

He would pick up holes in language, data, challenge appropriateness of methodology, point out misleading conclusions.

It is hard to reconcile with the feeling that Meekal Ahmed, a distinguished economist who occasionally contributed to this paper and commented on almost every economic piece, is no more. His last comment on my columns was printed on December 6, 2013. He disagreed with my suggestion to impose a combination of import compression and capital controls to save the rupee. He was unhappy with my description of economic reform as the IMF theology.

We first had a chance meeting in 1973 in a hostel room of the then University of Islamabad, serving as a makeshift office of M L Qureshi, who was busy reestablishing the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics after the fall of Dhaka. I was assisting him in the revival of the Pakistan Development Review. Mr Qureshi introduced Meekal as the brilliant son of his friend Aziz Ahmed, a deputy chief in the Planning Commission. Tall and handsome, Meekal took an arrogant look at me and said: “So you are the guy who would edit greats. Hope GC (Government College, Lahore) prepared you for this!” Then he kept on talking to Mr Qureshi as if I did not exist! What else can you expect from the son of Mr Aziz Ahmed, I thought. East Pakistani politicians used to grumble: We don’t know any central or provincial government. We only know Aziz Ahmed. He was the all-powerful secretary general of the government of East Pakistan.



In 1974, I joined the Ministry of Finance. When General Ziaul Haq took over in 1977, all those recruited during Mr Bhutto’s period were punished in one form or the other. My immediate ‘punishment’ was a transfer to the Planning Commission. There was, as a matter of fact, no commission. Dr Mubashir Hasan, Mr Bhutto’s finance minister, viewed the place as a bastion of anti-people economics. No deputy chairman had been appointed after the unceremonious exit of Qamarul Islam in 1972. The elite group of economists, mostly the scions of the CSP, had either left for international financial institutions or was in the process of doing so. Meekal, I was told, was in the process of completing his never-ending doctoral dissertation that started at Oxford in 1970. He was in and out of the Planning Commission until the completion of his dissertation in 1980. He had joined as assistant chief in the mid-1960s –– the heydays of the Planning Commission. Eventually, he became the chief of International Economics and rose to be the joint chief economist, concerned with macroeconomic planning. He retired as chief economist while on deputation with the IMF. The then finance minister, Shaukat Aziz, had asked him to return as deputy chairman, a position that was offered to him during the second coming of prime minister Benazir Bhutto as well. While the declining role of the Planning Commission was a factor in his decision to decline the request, the fact that he had left the country for personal reasons weighed more.

While Meekal’s work at the Planning Commission and later as a senior adviser to the executive director for a group of countries that included Pakistan, suggests macroeconomic policy as his main area of interest, his written academic work is nearly entirely in the domain of microeconomics. His doctoral thesis was on “Productivity, prices and relative income shares in Pakistan’s large-scale manufacturing sector, 1958-70”, a fashionable subject of research in those days. Real wages, remittances and aid effectiveness were his other interests. When on attack — intellectually that is — he would pick up holes in language and data, challenge the appropriateness of methodology and point out the misleading nature of conclusions, and all this in a style very few could match in wit and sharpness.

May his soul rest in peace.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 14^th,  2014.

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