A very predictable budget

There was nothing in this budget for the poor. Not even the great Zulfikar Ali Bhutto could deliver a people's budget.

Had we been literate, articulate and a mite more sensible with our vote, chances are that our politics would not have been so partisan and we would not have had political quacks as leaders. With men who could look beyond their noses, we would not have had to engage in wars and the bloody spasms and convulsions that have overtaken us would not have been our fate. This age-old adage applies so poignantly to us that we need look no further than at the wretched performance of parliament on budget day.

It is not that I am against protesting, whenever there is abuse there should be clamour and protest. But running down the aisle and hurling bangles at the finance minister while he is presenting the budget is not by any reckoning the parliamentary way of protesting. In fact, if the truth be told, Mr Shaikh had stood manfully in the middle of the road as the IMF bulldozer bore down on him and it is only when it seemed he would get run over that he decided to stand aside. Hurling of bangles by women MPs was also a ridiculous act. While it was not so much that they consider him to be not man enough, their action confirmed them more as women than as elected representatives with all that it connotes in our male dominated society.

Similarly, the sight of the finance minister wearing earplugs to block off the raucous cacophony emerging from the opposition MPs, who were determined that he should not be heard, bodes ill for the future. Mr Shaikh, not that he is any great shakes, will now develop the habit of not listening but talking past them just to be heard.

To a layman like me, the figures that Mr Shaikh bandied about made little sense. In Urdu, they were especially unfathomable. While hazaar, lakh, or even crore were familiar and comprehensible, arab and khharab were too much to grasp. In fairness though, economics never made sense to me.

Harold Wilson, among the wittiest of all modern British prime ministers, said many a true word and only half in jest. A couple that readily come to mind are: “Inflation is like sin: Every government denounces it and every government practices it” and “one man’s wage rise is another man’s price increase”. Both those thoughts surged up in my mind when Mr Shaikh said that pensions would be raised while leaving unsaid the inflationary impact that further massive government borrowing would have on the common man.

That there was nothing in this budget for the poor was very predictable and it rightly provoked loud shouts. When has there ever been? Not even when the great pseudo socialist Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was at the helm. And whatever little is inserted in the budget gets further reduced in the many mini (revised) budgets that are surreptitiously introduced during the course of the year.

Naturally, this does not bother our politicians on both sides of the house. They come from the middle classes, there being no aristocracy, let alone nobility left in Pakistan. Perhaps because of their proximity to the working classes, they are far more hostile to them than the nobility ever were or could be.

Considering the deplorable state of federal health facilities in the country, it is tragic that the federal expenditure on health is so low. And it is utterly depressing to learn from an impeccable source that only 7,000 out of 37,000 government schools in Sindh are functional.

That the defence allocation had been raised by 12 per cent was perhaps inevitable in the circumstances, though it did not cause much cheer. But what was surely not cheerful was the increase of funds for the Foreign Office (FO). This is not to say that the FO doesn’t deserve more money, it does, given the number of missions that are being maintained. But why on earth at this juncture, when our penury has never been greater, should we be maintaining so many missions?

To get back to where I started, what are we to do when our sovereign body — the parliament — fails repeatedly, degenerating into a garish circus or turning at a moment’s notice into a traditional dangal. Must we now, as we have done so often before, pin our hopes for a more mature parliament after the next election — or just pray for a miracle?

Published in The Express Tribune, June 8^th, 2011.