The young audience

EVERY time I pick up the papers, I read that a network is bragging about one of its shows attracting the 18- to 39-year-old audience.

And why shouldn’t they brag? The 18 to 39s are the only ones in America who have any buying power.

The network producer of a reality show called “Death Rattle” told me “Death” was watched by 40 million people, all under the age of 39. The person who doesn’t die from a heart attack after climbing Mount Everest wins a million dollars.

Ron Kendall, the producer, was merciless. “We are reaching the audience we want and we are making the sponsor very happy. The 18- to 39-year-old audience buys beer, Nike running shoes and BMWs. They are making the economy soar, unlike the tightwad 40- to 90-year-old losers who hang onto their money because they are afraid their pensions won’t get them through their September years.”

I said, “There is one thing I don’t understand. The biggest advertisers on television are the drug companies who are selling pharmaceuticals for everything from arthritis to insomnia.”

“At the moment these are not problems of the under 39 crowd. But they will be later. All the drug companies are trying to do at this time is educate the younger people as to what they have to look forward to later on. We want the kids to know when they turn 40, and for the rest of their lives, they will always have Viagra waiting for them.”

I asked, “Suppose the over-40 population wants to buy something?”

“We can’t stop them. At the same time, the advertiser is not sucking up to them.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well, our surveys show that the mature audiences always go to the washroom when the commercial comes on and they always take a newspaper with them.”

“Where do the 18 to 39s get their money?” I asked.

“From their parents. One of the reasons the over 40s are lacking in purchasing power is that they have to support their children.”

“Even the 39-year-olds?”

“Especially the 39-year-olds.”

“Do your shows only appeal to the youth market?”

“Of course. The networks are always trying to put no-brainers on the air. The less complicated the programme is, the higher the rating.”

“Is ‘Death Rattle’ so popular because you don’t have to be a nuclear scientist to understand it?”

“You can say that again.”

A strange thing happened while we were talking. Two moving men came into the office and started removing furniture. Kendall said, “What are you doing?”

One of the movers read from a slip of paper. “You’re Ron Kendall and you were born in 1962. That makes you 40 and you have been fired.”

“Give me a break. I still have all my marbles.”

“We were told to make no exceptions.”

“I didn’t know about this.”

“You should have thought of that before you decided to turn 40.”—Dawn/Tribune Media Services

Reforming the parliament

UNDETERRED by the low voter turnout in the referendum on April 30, and assured by his advisers that he has won public approval of his continuance in office, General Musharraf may be getting ready to finalize and unveil the structural changes he wants to introduce to improve our system of governance. One of the contemplated changes relates to parliament.

He has, once or twice, spoken of enhancing the Senate’s role. This is undoubtedly deserving of serious consideration. The other day he said he was thinking of reducing the parliament’s term from five to four or three years. I hope we can persuade him to discard this idea and, instead, focus on other aspects of the parliament’s work.

Some of the more radical among America’s democratic theorists preached that annual elections were essential to the maintenance of liberty, and that in their absence tyranny would ensue. Longer intervals between elections, they thought, would make elected officials unmindful of their obligation to serve the public interest, inclining them to self-aggrandizement and nepotism.

But annual elections were too much of a hassle and the idea did not gain general acceptance. The framers of the American constitution reached a compromise, providing for a two-year term for the House of Representatives, a six-year term for members of the Senate, and a four-year term for the president. State constitutions adopted a similar pattern.

We in Pakistan are used to five-year terms. A slightly shorter term will not necessarily make elected officials more sensitive to their constituents’ expectations. Consider also that elections cost both the public and the candidates a great deal of money. If the latter are to fund their campaigns out of their own resources, they would have to be wealthy. Surely we do not want our assemblies to be the preserves of the rich. Nor would we want our representatives to resort to corruption to recover the money they had spent on getting elected. We should reform campaign financing before we think of more frequent elections.

There are other things wrong with our legislatures that need the reformer’s attention. There is first the most troubling fact that no organ of government (president, prime minister, cabinet, bureaucracy), including the parliament itself, takes its work seriously. Successive governments in Pakistan have chosen to rule not by laws made by parliament but by ordinances promulgated by the president — quite often just a few days before parliament was scheduled to meet or a few days after it had adjourned.

This has meant that the government did not bring real work for parliament to do. This practice must be stopped. The president should not have the authority to issue ordinances except in situations of grave emergency. In normal circumstances the government should anticipate its need for new legislation and should have bills ready for presentation to parliament at its next session. In cases where delay simply cannot be countenanced, parliament might be called into special session to deal with them, and in such event the government should have to explain its failure in proper legislative planning.

Much too often the prime minister, members of his cabinet, and a majority of the legislators are absent from the floor and the Speaker has to adjourn the house for lack of quorum. A way has to be found to persuade them to sit in the assembly on a more regular basis. It is difficult to be sure what that way would be. Attendance would likely improve greatly if the prime minister and his cabinet colleagues were to spend more time on the floor. It would improve also if the party whips imposed some kind of a discipline on their respective members regarding their participation in the assembly’s work.

In the United States a record is normally kept of each legislator’s voting on various bills, participation in debate in the house and deliberations in the committee rooms. Newsmen make this record known to his constituents, and if it is poor it will hurt him in his bid for re-election. A similar practice might be instituted in Pakistan.

Would a representative’s record of performance influence the attitude of his constituents toward him? That depends largely on what they expect from him. It is quite possible that at the present stage of their political awareness most voters do not give much thought to the quality of their representative’s work in the assembly. They will think well of him if he has been able to bring water, paved streets and roads, schools, clinics, electricity, protection from police and bureaucratic oppression, and perhaps even jobs to his area.

A representative will not be able to do much in serving his constituents if he does not belong to the ruling party. A great many of the politically aware people support a candidate for election because he is the nominee of a political party of their choice, and not so much because of his own particulars and merits. If this party takes control of the government and establishes the image of a good ruler, some of the voter’s favourable perception of its performance will extend to its assembly members.

On the other hand, if it is an opposition party, its adherents will support its nominees for ideological reasons or because of their traditional association with it. They will assess their representative’s performance in terms of his effectiveness in opposing the government and in defending their ideological persuasion. In any case, the leaders of the various parties in the assembly must take some responsibility for the quality of their members’ participation in its work.

Legislative assemblies are deliberative bodies that articulate and settle issues of national interest through debate. They are not needed if there is to be no debate; they are inadequate to the extent that the debate they allow is perfunctory. There have been far too many occasions in our experience when legislation of great importance, including constitutional amendments, was rushed through the house virtually without debate. This should not be allowed to happen.

Debate is avoided by resort to a procedural device called “suspension of the rules.” The sponsor of a legislative measure, usually a spokesman for the government, asks the Speaker to suspend the assembly’s rules of business which require bills to go through specified stages of consideration, on the floor and in committees, before they can finally be voted upon. The rules should be amended so as to disallow departure from normal procedure except when delay even of a few days might have disastrous consequences.

In some ways politics in pre-independence India was the politics of protest. On occasion discontent found expression in movements of noncooperation with the government and civil disobedience. It took the form of “walk-outs” from legislative councils and assemblies. The opposition would leave the chamber to express its disapproval of a ruling by the Speaker, or to register its outrage at the proceedings and its dissociation with them. This practice may have been appropriate when we lived under foreign rule. But unfortunately it has persisted even after independence and shows no sign of abating. Members of the opposition in the national assembly walk out of the house almost routinely when they cannot have their way with the Speaker or when the government won’t listen to them.

Once in a while members of the ruling party will go to the hallways to persuade the opposition to return to the floor, but as often as not they don’t care: they go on with the agenda item before the house and settle it according to their own lights or preferences even if the opposition is absent (having tea and “samosas” in the cafeteria).

Walkouts are a part of the operational style of politicians in the subcontinent. I don’t remember hearing of them in connection with legislatures in the established democracies. Needless to say, they serve no useful purpose. The opposition would make a greater impact on public opinion if, instead of walking out, it remained on the floor and spoke against the move or measure that is repugnant to its sensibilities. We cannot do away with walkouts by writing something against them in the assembly’s rules of business. It calls for a mature sense of respect for the institution itself on the part of its members and a certain generosity of spirit on the part of the ruling majority in dealing with the opposition.

Fistfights are not common in the assembly but members do sometimes become noisy and rowdy, and the Speaker is not able to maintain order in the house. This is partly because the members are not mindful enough of the decorum of the house, but partly also because the Speaker does not command the respect he must to be effective. This in turn results from the fact that he is not always impartial as between the government and the opposition benches.

The Speaker is viewed, often correctly, as an instrument of the ruling party. What can be done to enhance the Speaker’s status? The tradition of his independence, and the respect accorded to him as a result, has to begin somewhere. It seems that the Speaker himself must be the initiator of this process. Let him resign if the ruling party, with whose support he reached his office, will not let him function impartially. The opposition in the assembly and the organs of public opinion will support his stance. If two Speakers in a row resign in protest against the ruling party’s pressure, the prestige of the office will surely begin to rise.

The next nuclear war

INDIA and Pakistan haven’t fought a real war with each other for over thirty years now, and few people on either side realise that it wouldn’t be like the wars of the past, when mostly soldiers died.

In neither country has public opinion grasped the fact that nuclear weapons change everything. So let us imagine what a war between the two would be like in 2002.

India, of course, doesn’t want a nuclear war, because its seven times bigger population and ten times larger economy mean that it would almost certainly win a conventional war with Pakistan. It makes perfect sense, therefore, for India to promise ‘no first use’ of nuclear weapons, and it has duly done so. It is in this wishful context that Indian officials talk about the possibility of a “limited war” in which India, naturally, would be victorious.

Pakistan’s position is precisely the opposite. It has not promised to refrain from using its nuclear weapons first, because to do so would leave India free to crush it in a conventional war. For Pakistan, nuclear weapons are the essential ‘equaliser’ that puts both parties in a position of equal vulnerability. That is why the Vajpayee government’s decision four years ago to test Indian nuclear weapons, forcing Pakistan to follow suit, was a strategic imbecility: the only war with Pakistan that India might not win is a nuclear war.

Prime Minister Vajpayee is determined to punish Pakistan for what he sees as Pakistani government-backed ‘cross-border terrorism’ (though the Islamist terrorists may now be beyond President Musharraf’s control, and some are deliberately trying to precipitate a war). Musharraf is committed to launching nuclear weapons if the Indian army breaks through Pakistani defences. India would inevitably reply with its own nuclear weapons. What would such a war be like?

For those who do not live in the subcontinent, the most important fact is that the damage would be largely confined to the region. The cold war is over, the strategic understandings that once tied India and Pakistan to the rival alliance systems have all been cancelled, and no outside powers would be drawn into the fighting.

The detonation of a hundred or so relatively small nuclear weapons over India and Pakistan would not cause grave harm to the wider world from fallout. People over 40 have already lived through a period when the great powers conducted hundreds of nuclear tests in the atmosphere, and they are mostly still here. Bangladesh and Burma would see a big rise in radiation-related deaths over the next decade, but the damage elsewhere would be slight.

For India and Pakistan, however, the experience would be beyond imagination. Take the lowest estimates of deliverable Indian and Pakistani nuclear warheads — say 100 for India, and 50 for Pakistan. Assume that one-third are destroyed before launch or fail to work. Drop most of the rest on cities, or on army bases and airfields that are near cities. What do you get?

Lahore, Rawalpindi, Islamabad, Multan and Karachi: gone. Delhi, Ahmedabad, Amritsar, Jaipur and maybe Bombay: gone. Twenty or thirty or fifty million people killed outright or condemned to a lingering death — as if somebody suddenly exterminated Spain or South Korea. Pakistan broken into squabbling successor states, and perhaps India split between the economically dynamic south and the less prosperous, horribly injured northern ‘Hindi belt’ as well.

Of course, nothing so bad has happened since the last nuclear war, 57 years ago. Maybe it won’t happen now. Maybe Vajpayee and Musharraf are both just bluffing. We shall see — and probably by autumn.

— Copyright

No time or cause to fight

IN 1965 when India and Pakistan went to war, Indonesia, Iran and Turkey opened their armouries to us, and the Saudis, it was then believed, their treasury. Today, as Pakistan faces the Indian troops three times as many as its own on the Line of Control in Kashmir, there is not a word of sympathy from these four or any other Muslim country.

That is the net result of Pakistan’s politics of madrassahs and jihad practised during the intervening years. To avert war President Musharraf is banking only on “good sense to prevail in India” and on American intervention. It is as if our orthodox religious leaders and neo-religious political parties have remorselessly used Islam to isolate Pakistan from the rest of the Muslim world. While President Musharraf reaps the whirlwind of the wind they had sown, he must add to that his own three dithering years.

Afghanistan, implacably hostile to Pakistan in 1965 and a close ally of India, did not provoke trouble on the western border which it could easily have through many surrogates it then had in Pakistan’s tribal area. That was a remarkable display of Muslim solidarity despite political differences and a rare occasion when King Zahir Shah overruled his powerful “uncles” and friends of India.

To the world, Pakistan has become a jihadi, or militant, power only because of the long campaign its intelligence agents and armed volunteers waged to liberate and unite Afghanistan. It is doubtful whether the brutalized Afghan society Pakistan’s jihad has spawned has made this country’s western frontier any securer than it was in 1965. Its eastern frontier with India and the Line of Control in Kashmir undoubtedly has become more vulnerable ever since some jihadi elements, their job in Afghanistan over with its warlords and tribes at each other’s throat, went into Kashmir to subvert the freedom struggle so bravely and yet so unpretentiously launched by the people of the Valley.

Two decades of jihad thus has given Pakistan a militant image without bringing peace or liberty either to Afghanistan or to Kashmir. Instead, it has inflicted enormous death and privations on both with no end in sight. For Pakistan it has been an all-round costly bargain, for its own internal cohesion stands shattered by free flow of arms and a violent schism. How well and long Pakistan can fight and hold back an invading India which admittedly has three to one superiority men and arms, conventional and nuclear, is for the commanders and war experts to say. The obvious feeling the common people without authority (called “civil society” in the World Bank jargon) have is that it is no time to fight and there is no reason to fight.

A war, howsoever limited or short, would mean a severe setback for the economy at a time when it is barely put on the course of recovery and a severer setback to the Kashmir freedom movement when it is close to extracting substantial concessions from the Indians.

The world opinion holds that President Musharraf’s effort to deal firmly with the armed fundamentalists is tempered by political expediency. The general impression is that he does not want to drive them too hard at a time when the political forces opposed to him are further emboldened by the result of an unnecessary and inconsequential referendum. The world view was bluntly articulated by UN Secretary-General Kofi Anan last Thursday when he called upon Musharraf to fulfil the commitment he made on January 12.

The statements by some political leaders and stories in Pakistan’s own press about the guerilla training camps in Azad Kashmir and elsewhere fly in the face of the now trite official contention that Pakistan’s support to popular uprising in Kashmir is no more than political, moral and diplomatic. When our own people do not believe it, how would the rest of the world? The UN, EU and all the rest are justified in demanding a sterner control over the religious groups who train the Kashmiri or foreign fighters and a greater vigilance along the Line of Control to check their entry into occupied Kashmir.

President Musharraf should have no delusions about the religious groups supporting him if he connived at their militancy or acted soft against them. His views and lifestyle are too well known to them to trust him as their patron or partisan. He should also realize that the armed infiltrators going into Kashmir at this stage would hurt and not help the indigenous insurgency. The struggle of the people has reached a stage where India cannot but hold early and fair elections in Kashmir, and the Hurriyat Conference must win them whenever they are held. The observers and pressmen from all over the world will be watching them.

Once the Hurriyat has won the elections the moral force of the awakened world opinion will back the forgotten right of the people of Kashmir to self-determination. Continued armed support originating in Pakistan, or passing through it, would give India an excuse not to hold elections and yet have the world opinion on its side.

In the current situation if India attacks Pakistan the world powers may not back India, yet they would blame Pakistan for it. The people of Pakistan are averse to war not for their safety and well-being alone but also because it would squash a freedom movement which the people of Kashmir have sustained at a heavy cost for 13 years.

At the moment the people are too preoccupied with earning their livelihood to feel inspired to fight and die. No Noorjahan is left to arouse their patriotic emotions either. Musharraf will find the people, the silent majority, on his side in fighting terrorism rather than India.