With its economy on a downward spiral, no amount of bailout will work. Pakistan is set to implode sooner rather than later
Pakistan’s economy is on the brink of a collapse. It is like a patient on a ventilator, surviving on a heart-lung machine called international borrowing. Recently, the country went with a begging bowl to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which granted it $6 billion but most part of the bailout will go to service its earlier loans of over $106 billion and partly cover its budget deficit, too. This situation is like that of the broke French monarchy under Louis XVI, which kept borrowing money from Dutch bankers until they stopped giving loans realising that they would never get their money back. The result was the French Revolution of 1789.
Unemployment, which was already massive, has now reached record heights as Pakistan’s economy is in doldrums and poverty has seen a sharp rise. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth fell almost 50 per cent — from 6.2 per cent to 3.4 per cent in the last year. It is expected to go down further to 2.4 per cent next year. Inflation is at an all-time high. Prices of petrol, gas cylinders, food items and electricity among other things have hit the roof. The Pakistan rupee lost one-fifth of its value against the dollar since last year. Servicing national debt eats up 30 per cent of its budget, while the military eats up another 25 per cent. Indirect taxes fall mainly on the poor, while the rich find it cheaper to bribe tax officials rather than pay tax. This is reminiscent of the situation in France before the French Revolution when the tax burden fell mainly on the poor peasantry, while the rich aristocrats paid no tax.
Pakistan was created as an Islamic state but religion cannot feed you. One has to eat food and to eat food, one must have a job, getting which is becoming more difficult with every passing day. According to a 2018 National Nutrition Survey by the Pakistan Health Ministry, over 50 per cent families in Pakistan cannot have two meals a day. Half of Pakistani children are underweight and/or stunted and do not get enough vitamins A and D. Sixty-eight per cent of the children are anaemic. While the country can grow enough food for its people, many do not have the money to buy it as business tycoons and powerful political families keep the prices high. Medicines are made by multinational firms, which also keep prices high. This often makes it unaffordable for the masses.
During his election speeches, Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan had highlighted the high level of malnutrition, infant mortality and stunted growth of children in Sindh. He had blamed the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) for spending crores of rupees on cultural activities and none on these more important issues. However, he himself has done little to address these issues. Now, he has sought to divert the attention of the people from issues such as economic crisis, record unemployment and malnutrition to developments in Kashmir. He has sworn that he will give a “befitting response” to India by giving a nuke threat, not to forget his gimmicks, for example, his call to Pakistanis to spend half an hour standing in mass gatherings to show “solidarity” for the Kashmiri people (his public speech in Islamabad reminded me of a few lines from William Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “It is a tale. Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.”)
I have already talked in detail about the predatory nature of the Pakistan military and its real ruler, both of which have infiltrated their tentacles into almost every sector of its economy to benefit its officers (see my article titled, “The truth about the Pakistan military” as well as Ayesha Siddiqa’s book, Military Inc. and her interviews on YouTube). The Pakistan Army is like a vampire and is sucking the blood of the poor Pakistanis. The Generals, many of whom are billionaires (as mentioned in Eliot Wilson’s article referred to in my article), justify their loot by peddling the idea that the Army over there is the sole bastion and saviour of the Islamic Republic against its mortal enemy, India, and, hence, it must be rewarded for its “patriotic duty” by giving it huge privileges and perks (an euphemism for loot and rapine). But how long can Pakistanis be deceived? No doubt, most people are scared of the military as it has the gun (“all power flows from the barrel of a gun,” as Mao said) but already, there are sounds of rumbling against it in Balochistan, Sind, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Gilgit-Baltistan, which is bound to develop into a full blown insurgency as the economic crisis intensifies. Pakistan, which was artificially created in 1947 through Partition, on the basis of the two-nation theory (see Mission Statement and Addresses to the Indian Nation in indianreunificationassociation.co.in), is bound to implode.
(The writer is a former judge of the Supreme Court of India)