The second coming

I remember being taught in a South Asian history class about how the British used up India’s resources and left the country to dry out. A classic case of mass exploitation can be seen in how the country’s railway system was developed. The British East India Company had laid out the track to benefit its trade. The routes were not selected to connect the major cities of the time to provide better connectivity for the region or to benefit its inhabitants. The track was laid out for more mercantile purposes, to transport goods to the port to be exported out of the country. The entire programme was funded for India’s gold reserves and at the time the company offered high interest rates to British citizens who invested in the industry.

In hindsight, the benefits of having an extensive railway network are apparent, but what is lesser known is how none of the expertise involved in building it was transferred to this region. Why didn’t the Indian investors benefit from the investments? The track merely connected the raw material site with the shipping site, with there being little vision to better the situation of the people living in the region, albeit taxing them nonetheless.

Here it is not difficult to draw parallels with the CPEC. Not only is the $40-50 billion investment procured from Chinese banks, the workers and expertise too will be from China. With sovereign guarantees offered by the Nawaz Sharif government, it is difficult to see how the entire nation will not be burdened with an unendurable degree of debt for generations to come.

Ishaq Dar has already lost control over his ministry to the IMF in exchange for a few billion dollars. Naturally, in such a scenario, the creditor starts interfering with local affairs. It is hard not to see this as a regressive move, back towards becoming a colony of the IMF.

Where only a debt of a few billion dollars leads Pakistan to partially lose control over its financial affairs, it does not take an imaginative mind to guess what a $46 billion debt will lead to. While there might not be the kind of ‘colonisation’ one saw during British rule, we can already see the Chinese language increasingly being taught across the country, the government being told to bring its ducks in a row with the Karachi operation and the integration of Gilgit-Baltistan. It appears that creditors have begun to establish a stronghold. This may not entirely be a bad thing. For the era of neo-colonisation, I suggest we buckle up and pick up an idiot’s guide to learn Mandarin.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 19^th, 2016.