Do we ever hear our ruling elites go smug over how they have managed to curtail gendered disparity in the country or have brought about a decline in incidents of street crime, or have ensured swift justice for the ordinary man? Or do we ever hear them boast the very rare events of the country’s slightly shrinking illiteracy rates or rising Human Development Index? Hardly ever.
What we do hear, instead, are celebratory utterances extolling augmented economic indicators: a slowing rate of inflation, borrowing-induced balance of payment surpluses and record-breaking remittances, as solely defining Pakistan’s developmental trajectory.
One of the reasons for never acknowledging social development indicators, besides their apparent worthlessness in the eyes of authorities, is perhaps the fact that these indicators have never really witnessed a notable improvement in Pakistan due to having been perpetually ignored and trivialised by successive governments.
While holistic development is not all about improving economic – more so, macroeconomic indicators in our case – our ruling elites are only used to touting and proclaiming the latter. What is even more concerning is the fact that even these macroeconomic indicators are only as good as being relatively better than our social and human development indices, and are fleetingly flimsy, and are brazenly facilitated by foreign assistance and funding.
A recent State Bank report bursts the bubble of our macroeconomic complacence when it highlights that our productivity growth – also a measure of our economic competitiveness – has been falling as we continue to rely on short-term solutions for quick, short-lived outcomes, instead of going for politically tough choices including, but not limited to, structural reforms.
The almost concurrent “State of Human Rights in 2024” annual report by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) last week also succinctly sums up the most pressing socio-political challenges confronting Pakistan: “political engineering, economic precarity, religious extremism, gendered violence and ecological collapse” being among what the report lists as major obstacles to the country’s democratic existence.
While the State Bank report sheds light on our borrowed ‘economic stability’ and the stark reality of its fragility, the HRCP report blatantly lays bare how successive governments in Pakistan have overlooked human rights and human development, making us wonder what is it that we have really done right in the past 77 years of our existence to put the country onto the correct development track. Placed side-by-side, the two reports together paint a perturbing picture.
The State Bank report rightly recommends that if the economy is to escape the repeated low growth, boom-bust cycles and bailouts, it must carry out real reforms, rather than circumvent them, while laying claim to temporarily boosted economic productivity.
The report continues that the economy must build up its competitiveness to enhance exports, especially in the post-Trump-tariffs era, attract Foreign Direct Investment and become part of global value chains, which we are not. The circumstances, as depicted in the report, warrant implementation of deep-rooted and long-pending structural reforms to address fundamental issues within the economy.
Interlinked and inimical to development, the multiple crises listed in the HRCP and State Bank reports are also absolute outcomes of each other. Political manipulation is the mother of all evils, since in order to enable and sustain a politically engineered setup, so many normalcies, stabilisers and sustainers have to be upended, something that we have witnessed following the 2024 general election. It is political transgression that triggers the overall downward spiral of a country.
Launched close to the International Workers’ Day last week, the report also reveals that miners, sanitation workers and polio workers faced heightened safety risks in the country, with at least 172 work-related deaths in 2024 reported only in these three sectors
As authorities also cede space to undemocratic tendencies in the form of several hastily and unilaterally passed laws and ordinances that proved to be discriminatory and highly flawed, democracy backslides even further, says the report. Without rectifying such growing authoritarian tendencies of governments and the denial of electoral rights, it is next to impossible to deliver social and economic justice that can benefit the people and truly strengthen the writ of the state.
Furthermore, it is not possible to prosper on the economic front, even if a country appears to be on a track of apparent economic progress, unless the masses are guaranteed constitutional protections and rights, which is why the HRCP report urges the state institutions and all political parties “to place human rights at the heart of public policy,” a feature that has remained direly missing from our public policy Initiatives for decades, if not forever. Here, people-friendly policies have always been elusive.
According to the same report democracy, federalism, the rule of law and judicial independence have all been “under heavy strain” in the year 2024. Violations of various types of rights have been evident throughout the year, while a decline in civic freedoms, deteriorating law and order, and a marked strain on federalism have been pronounced.
It is not unknown that militancy also spiked in 2024, while the resulting fatalities allegedly soared to more than 2,500, with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan mostly bearing the brunt of the bulk of such brutish attacks. What the HRCP dubs as state-sanctioned violence also seemed to surge in 2024, with at least 379 officially reported cases of enforced disappearance and 4,864 staged police encounters in Sindh and Punjab alone.
No comprehensive report can be complete without taking into account the impact of extreme weather events, the recurring freak climate patterns and the hazardous air quality, episodes that were all a part of a typical 2024. And when it comes to climate-change-related challenges, we first need to wholeheartedly acknowledge the issues in order to successfully confront them. Denial and delusion will only spell deadly disasters in years to come, as climate-related upheavals continue to catch us unawares.
Lamenting the continued ban on social media platform X, arrests of journalists, repeated imposition of Section 144 to prevent public gatherings and the use of disproportionate force, the HRCP report enlists these factors as reflective of a state that is not equipped to tolerate legitimate dissent or critique. The report criticises such muzzling of freedom of expression and remarks that in a true democracy, public officials should not be above legitimate criticism by the electorate.
The report also points out that the controversial 26th constitutional amendment resulted in an executive overreach in the affairs of the judiciary – instead of depoliticising the judiciary, which the amendment was supposedly meant to achieve. On the deliverance of justice, the report states that while at least 174 death sentences have reportedly been handed down by the courts in 2024, no executions were carried out during the year. The rate of overcrowding at the country’s jails is a whopping 228%, according to the report.
Launched close to the International Workers’ Day last week, the report also reveals that miners, sanitation workers and polio workers faced heightened safety risks in the country, with at least 172 work-related deaths in 2024 reported only in these three sectors.
Enlisting violence against women and children, the report calls it pervasive, with at least 405 honour killings, 4,175 cases of rape, 1,641 domestic murders, and 1,630 instances of violence against children.
As the government continues to repatriate Afghan nationals, HRCP points out concerns that the ensuing deportations do not meet international standards of ‘consent and dignity.’ The country’s education and health outcomes last year remained poor too, facts that fail to surprise us anymore, but should certainly spur us into action.
Those at the helm of affairs often say that such reports as the HRCP’s annual document besmirch the country’s name and tarnish its reputation. But these reports only record our reality and mirror the mundane, which is more relevant than our international image or what the world thinks of us.
Let us work towards improving these realities and the image will follow naturally.