Thoughts on the planning of new fiscal year

By Afzal Hussain Bokhari

Except for occasional offers from sincere friends of free cigarettes and related delicacies, I have never been a regular smoker in my life in the formal sense.

The manner in which Federal Minister Dr Abdul Hafeez Sheikh came with a heavy hand on tobacco addicts on Saturday created feelings of sympathy in me for all smokers in the country especially those who reach for their packet of Marlboro while watching Katrina Kaif do the Om Shanti Om number with Akshay Kumar with Pyramids of Egypt in the background.

Rahat Ali Khan has all the basic ingredients of music in his system but the natural flow in Shrea Goshal's voice is simply intoxicating while rendering Teri Ore item.

If someone in the ministry thought that smokers had extra bucks to throw away, he was sadly mistaken. Without promoting tobacco in any manner, I would tend to believe that smokers had their own emotional dilemmas and psychological tensions.

Sitting beside the taxi-cab driver, I would rather inhale the pungent fumes than tell him to throw away his smelly cigarette.

It is to blow away his tension, and not to show off his filthy money, that he puffs at a cigarette. It is a pity to imagine that illiterate labourers, bus conductors and peasants in the rural hinterland will have to spend more on genuine as well as fake cigarettes after the section officers issue budget notifications.

Government employees were probably the first to benefit from the budget 2010-11 as the minister announced 50 percent ad hoc increase in the basic salaries. Similarly, the minister announced that employees who retired after 2001 would get 15 percent raise in pensions while those retiring before 2001 would get 20 percent raise.

However, only the pensioners know how they would be robbed of the additional money by grocers, milk sellers and proprietors of medical stores. Still the pensioners feel obliged to the finance minister for taking care of their concerns.

On the Labour Day, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gillani had announced to raise the minimum wages from Rs6,000 to 7,000 but there were protest demonstrations that employers were not even willing to pay Rs6,000.

Daily wage workers and those hired on contract have fallen on bad times. They do not understand the implications of enforcing the value added tax (VAT) but they can feel the pangs of hunger when their children go to bed without food. Employees working on contract may vaguely understand the importance of general sales tax (GST) but nobody can imagine the kind of embarrassment they feel when the parents-in-law get the engagement deals dissolved when the contracts are not extended or renewed.

The poor and the down-trodden may feel obliged to the finance minister that he has fixed the amount of minimum wages at Rs3, 000 instead of Rs2, 000.

With that amount in pocket, however, no doctor would agree to examine a patient thoroughly and no lawyer would bother to plead a pensioner's case in a court of law. Budget statistics are meant for the elite class. The uninitiated cannot see the wisdom behind staying attached to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which says that nations cannot develop if the poor continue to get subsidies on food and essential items of daily use.

Former federal finance minister Dr Mubashir Hassan at whose residence in Lahore Zulfikar Ali Bhutto founded his Pakistan People's Party back in 1968 appeared on a television show the other day and said that the present political system had decayed beyond redemption.

He said that it was a brutal irony of fate that in people's democratic government, one had got to be a billionaire to become a Senator. Though in different contexts, both Dr Mubashir Hassan and Maulana Munawar Hassan of Jamaat-i-Islami were telling their workers to be prepared for what they preferred to call a revolution.

The common man may not precisely understand what the total outlay of Rs3.25 trillion can possibly mean. He may feel difficulty in ranking Ishaq Dar, Shaukat Tareen and Dr Abdul Hafeez Sheikh according to their efficiency as finance ministers. However, he vaguely knows that at heart Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and his daughter Benazir Bhutto were good human beings and, if allowed to rule longer, they would have ameliorated the condition of the poor. If they had been around, essential items of daily use like sugar, rice and cooking oil would not have spun out of the people's reach.

The poor in Pakistan have very few demands to make. They only want an easy access to basic needs. Wheat flour, pulses and onions should be available in the market. Sons and daughters of ordinary people should feel safe at home, school and on the sidewalk.

Police should not behave like an occupying force. On road blockades, it should not humiliate the law-abiding citizens. Salaries have reasonably been revised and the low-ranking employees of police should not, therefore, insist on getting bribed at each and every step.

Officials of police, income tax, excise and taxation and food department have a nuisance value. They have, therefore, joined hands against the general public. Powerful groups - drug mafia, timber mafia, land mafia and members of the underworld - are gradually getting out of the control of law enforcing agencies. The weak and the dispossessed are not represented at any platform.

Hours after the announcement of the federal budget, the head of the Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Riaz Arshad and his fellow traders such as Haji Afzal and Sharafat Ali Mubarik addressed a press conference saying the budget was not acceptable to them.

On the other hand, the gas, electricity and several other things had become costlier after the budget but nobody was there to represent the poor and address a news conference on their behalf.

Poet of the East, Allama Mohammad Iqbal, rightly complained to God: "To Qadir-i-Mutlaq hai magar teray jahan main; hain talkh bohat banda-i-mazdoor ke auqaat!" Similarly, in another verse, he said: "Jis khait se dehqan ko muyasar na ho rozi; us khait ke har khosha-i-gandum ko jala do!"