Topic 1 : The General’s Raj
Introduction: This week’s story from Pakistan is not about who might win the national and provincial assembly elections there; it centres on army chief General Asim Munir, who is trying to consolidate his power. It does not really matter who Munir “selects” to run the front office (as the prime minister of the government). The fact is that Munir has put himself fully in charge of Pakistan.
How General Munir will be remembered in Pakistan?
- Having gambled big to put down the immensely popular Imran Khan, rearrange the political field, and push for major economic reform, Munir does not look like a man who will walk into the sunset when his term ends in late 2025.
- Like many of the previous chiefs, General Munir would want to stick around.
- Pakistan’s near-term fortunes, then, appear tied inextricably to Asim Munir’s.
- Although Munir seems to be following the familiar path of his predecessors at the GHQ in Rawalpindi in punishing civilian political leaders that come in their way, his task is complicated by the multiple crises buffeting the nation at home and the incredible shrinking of Pakistan in the region and the world.
- India has dealt with Pakistan’s generals who took charge of the country before.
- But General Munir’s quest for greater control may not be the movie we have seen before.
- To be sure, the dominant assumption in Delhi is that nothing ever changes in Pakistan.
- And that Pakistan’s generals will muddle along as they retain hold over Pakistan.
- Munir, however, is taking control amid the growing prospect that the old order in Pakistan is becoming unsustainable.
General Munir vs Imran Khan
- After a tentative start in November 2022, Munir has been moving full tilt to consolidate his power in the last few months.
- While his predecessor, Qamar Jawed Bajwa, installed Imran Khan as Prime Minister of Pakistan in 2018 and dethroned him in April 2022, it is Asim Munir who has had to pick up the burden of destroying Imran Khan personally and politically.
- Few political leaders have so threatened the Army’s dominance over Pakistan.
- Munir was prepared to go low to discredit Imran Khan.
- There is no other way of explaining the use of Islamic personal law to declare Khan’s marriage to Bushra Bibi illegal and punish him for it.
- This was General Munir’s last stab at puncturing Imran Khan’s political balloon, who had turned himself from a playboy into a pious Islamic leader.
- Recall Imran’s promise in 2018 to bring the “Riyasat-e-Medina” — a just welfare state — to Pakistan.
Imran Khan’s political and strategic blunders as the PM of Pakistan
- At home, Imran demonised his political opponents, let alone bothering to cultivate them.
- He was quite happy to rely on the Army’s backing to destroy potential rivals.
- On the external front, Imran Khan alienated all of Pakistan’s traditional friends.
- He accused Washington of plotting to overthrow him, celebrated the return of the Taliban to Kabul, and showed up in Moscow to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin as he invaded Ukraine.
- He sought to undermine the Saudi leadership of the Islamic world by aligning with Turkey and Malaysia.
- Imran also alienated Beijing by raising uncomfortable questions about the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.
- Critics would say Imran Khan deluded himself into thinking that his relationship with the Army was one of equals.
- He believed that Rawalpindi needed him as much as he needed the Army.
- But his supporters will say the story is not over.
- Despite the best efforts to malign him, Imran remains immensely popular with the younger generation in Pakistan.
The Pakistani army has to deal with a multitude of challenges
1. Repairing the image loss
- For one, Imran Khan has shown that the Army’s perch at the top of Pakistan’s political heap is no longer sacrosanct.
- He has emboldened the expanding urban classes at home and the diaspora abroad to challenge its authority.
2. Addressing the economic reforms
- Munir has presented himself as the champion of long overdue but painful economic reforms that the political class has been unwilling to touch.
- There is no guarantee that the planned reforms can be effectively implemented.
- Nor is it certain that they will deliver the desired positive results soon.
- As the owner of economic reform, Munir will also have to bear the political costs.
3. Addressing the internal and external security challenges
- The Army’s hands are also full dealing with growing security challenges on the volatile western borderlands in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
- The resurgence of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) militancy in the Pashtun tribal areas and growing problems with the Taliban government in Kabul are major security challenges for the Army.
- Munir has his task cut out in rejuvenating frayed relations with the US, navigating the rivalry between Washington and Beijing, and restoring productive relationships with Saudi Arabia.
- For long, Pakistan was best friends with the world’s two largest economies — the US and China — but it has so little to show for it now.
- The scale of Pakistan’s strategic economic failure is breathtaking.
- Its economy today is smaller than that of Bangladesh by more than $100 billion and is less than a tenth of India’s.
Why India has to be mindful of General Munir’s actions in Pakistan?
- Given the multiple problems that Pakistan confronts, relations with India can’t be at the top of General Munir’s mind.
- The questions for Delhi are no longer whether to engage Pakistan and on what terms.
- Pakistan’s rapid relative decline in the last few years has made those issues easier for Delhi to deal with.
- The challenge for India lies in assessing the pathways in which Pakistan might evolve under General Munir.
- After all, Gen Zia-ul-Haq’s Pakistan was very different from that of General Ayub Khan’s, and Munir’s dilemmas are not the same as Musharraf’s.
- The internal and external conditions confronting Munir are far more demanding than those that tested his predecessors.
Conclusion: The betting will be that Munir will win for now and pick up a prime minister of his choice. But that is when his problems will begin.
Topic 2 : Signal from industry
Introduction: On Monday, the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation released the results for the Annual Survey of Industries (ASI) for 2020-21 and 2021-22.
About the Annual Survey of Industries (ASI):
- The Annual Survey of Industries (ASI) was released by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation.
- It is the principal source of industrial statistics in India, and is the most comprehensive data on organised manufacturing.
- The ASI data relates to factories employing 10 or more workers using power and those employing 20 or more workers without using power.
- As such, they form a critical source of information on the registered organised manufacturing sector in the economy.
- As both these years — 2020-21 and 2021-22 — were marked by disruptions in economic activities on account of the pandemic, these surveys, by providing granular information, help in understanding how industry fared during those years.
Results on the performance of industries from the ASI
- At the aggregate level, gross value added grew by 8.8 per cent in 2020-21 (in current prices), after registering a fall the year before.
- Growth in value-added was driven by a sharper fall in input (at 4.07 per cent) than output (which fell by 1.9 per cent).
- In 2021-22, as the economy rebounded, value added grew by 26.6 per cent, with output growing at 35.4 per cent.
- In both these years, the registered organised manufacturing sector grew at a faster pace than the unorganised sector.
- The industries that drove growth during 2021-22 were manufacture of basic metal, coke and refined petroleum products, pharmaceuticals, motor vehicles, and chemicals — value added by these industries grew by 34.4 per cent.
- Profits, which were also depressed in 2019-20, bounced back during this period.
Performance of industries on the employment front
- The estimates of employment show that during the first year of the pandemic, total persons engaged fell marginally by 3.2 per cent — from 1.66 crore in 2019-20 to 1.6 crore in 2020-21.
- Employment picked up thereafter, with total persons engaged rising to 1.7 crore in 2021-22 — an increase of 7 per cent.
- This pick up in employment is encouraging.
- However, the pace at which quality jobs are being generated across all sectors at the aggregate all-India level leaves much to be desired.
- Between 2017-18 and 2022-23, while the labour force participation rate (15 years and above) saw a steady increase, rising from 49.8 per cent to 57.9 per cent, a greater percentage of workers were self-employed, not engaged in regular salaried or casual wage employment, as per the periodic labour force surveys.
- The share of workers that were self-employed rose from 52.2 per cent in 2017-18 to 57.3 per cent in 2022-23.
- Over the same period, the share of workers in manufacturing declined from 12.1 per cent to 11.4 per cent.
- This jobs dilemma has been, and will remain, the principal policy challenge.
Conclusion: Data shows employment picked up after Covid. But pace of job creation remains a challenge.