Author:
Publication: The Indian
Express
Date: September 23,
2000
In an article appearing
in the latest issue of the popular Pakistani Weekly, The Friday Times,
commentator Khaled Ahmed explains how his country's jehad on Kashmir has
not only driven away investors but is also forcing an increasing number
of Pakistanis to leave the country and delink their fate from the outcome
of this jehad which they can't help but support.
No economist working
for the government dare tell the truth about why Pakistanis are not investing
in Pakistan. Governor State Bank Dr Ishrat Husain says exporters
have not repatriated $ 700 million they earned abroad. This means
that an amount larger than our current level of foreign exchange reserves
is being kept abroad. Far from investing, Pakistanis don't even want
to keep their earnings in Pakistan.
Our former foreign secretary,
Najmuddin Sheikh, has done this in his article `Foreign Policy Imperative'
in The News (August 30, 2000). He writes: ``In the last week, the
stock market has fallen 17 points to what the brokers are calling resistance
line of 1500...It seems that on this occasion the drop reflects an enduring
sense of pessimism that pervades the market. As a result, investors
have paid little attention to the better-than-expected earnings and dividends
reported by some of the companies on the stock exchange and have ignored
the generally positive news about the performance of the agricultural sector.''
He goes on to tell us
that the rupee fell by 7 per cent of its value within days because the
State Bank, strapped for dollars, financed the trade deficit by picking
up dollars from the domestic market. Why isn't the economy picking
up despite the moratorium on debt-servicing won by us from our western
creditors? Foreign assistance stopped after we exploded the bomb in 1998,
but so did India; why is India not subject to the same conditions? In fact,
if you look at India and its growth rate, one could say that you should
explode the bomb for high growth rates.
Najmuddin Sheikh says
Pakistanis are leaving Pakistan in droves. He says many of them are
paying $ 150,000 per person to get the business visa which allows them
to stay in the US, the UK and Canada. The investors are not investing,
but why is the Pakistani man trying to leave the country? Newspapers have
reported that since October 1999, approximately 120,000 people have gone
out to the West on visas, and many among them will try not to come back.
Lahore's Passport Office has revealed that it issues 800 passports every
day. The US embassy in Islamabad has announced that it gives a thousand
visas a day to Pakistanis bound for the US. Other western embassies
have a similar rush. All of them have toughened their visa regulations
to stem the rising tide of people who no longer want to stay in Pakistan.
This is much more than
just the people's reluctance to put their money into new ventures.
Clearly, they no longer want to stay in Pakistan. If you ask them,
they can't really explain, except that there are no jobs left in Pakistan.
In any case, they can't say what really is behind their desire to leave.
They remain tied to the nationalism of their ideological state, having
long lost the ability to think on their own. They support the nuclear
explosion of 1998 and can't relate their plight to what happened to the
economy after that. They think that the Kargil Operation was a victory
and should be repeated. They are convinced that India should be confronted
militarily and defeated and that Pakistanis should sacrifice their all
for the cause of Kashmir. They are not in favour of signing the CTBT
because that is supposed to destroy Pakistan's nuclear capability; yet
they are leaving for the very countries who are asking Pakistan to sign
it.
One could go on and on.
The Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Lahore recommended forcefully to
Nawaz Sharif that he should explode the bomb in 1998 but failed after that
to respond to his appeal to invest. Instead, they resented the fact
that he had frozen their dollar accounts. They had earlier also not
responded to his appeal for dollars to rescue Pakistan's economy from default.
Do the members of the Chamber really know why they are reluctant to invest?
They don't. They give other reasons, mostly attached to the army,
but these reasons were valid in the post-1998 period too when the army
was not in power.
The truth of the matter
is that the economy was not picking up since 1990 and not responding to
a steady devaluation of the rupee. But after 1998, the members of
the Chamber simply adopted a wait-and-see policy and did not invest.
Some of them had said that after the nuclear explosion there will be an
explosion of economic activity, but what happened immediately after the
Chaghai test was closure of Karachi's stock exchange, which has not stopped
wobbling since then.
