Pocketbooks, not politics on minds of Pakistanis on Home Services

Dec

Pocketbooks, not politics on minds of Pakistanis

posted by admin in Home Inspection

Mumraiz Akhtar dressed his three sons in their best sweaters Thursday for a special outing to the holiday animal market, to see the goats painted with fluorescent pink dots and the cows with necklaces of plastic flowers.

The boys begged their father to buy an animal. But he said no. The price of animals for the Islamic Eid al-Adha holiday has doubled and even tripled in the past five years, and Akhtar, who makes $3.33 a day working odd jobs, could not spend $167 on a goat. He could barely afford to pay $1 for a kilogram of lentils, which cost 50 cents three years ago, or even to buy sugar, a commodity now described throughout Pakistan like a precious gem.

“What do I care about an election?” said Akhtar, 32, holding his youngest son in his arms and looking at the goats he could never afford. “I don’t have electricity. I don’t have gas. I don’t have water.”

As Pakistan prepares for parliamentary elections Jan. 8, many voters in the country sound increasingly cynical about what democracy might bring. They complain about embattled President Pervez Musharraf, who seized power in a bloodless military coup in 1999, and say he cares more about holding on to power than helping Pakistan. They have little hope that either of the two main opposition leaders, former Prime Ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, will change anything.

But for most people in the country, the economy is the biggest concern, more than the country’s controversial help in the U.S.-led war on terror, the rise in Islamic militancy or the squashing of civil rights by the recent six-week emergency.

A poll in late November by the International Republican Institute, a U.S.-based non-profit group, gave respondents a choice of 12 issues that would determine which political party they would support. A whopping 53 percent of 3,250 people picked inflation, followed by 15 percent who chose unemployment and 9 percent who chose poverty. Only 6 percent picked terrorism; just 2 percent chose democratic reforms.

In Gujar Khan, just as in other parts of Pakistan, people complained that the price of sugar has doubled in the past two months. The prices for milk, wheat, lentils, meat, mustard oil — all the staples of a Pakistani kitchen — have shot up in the past two years. Gas prices are expected to rise even higher in the coming months.

Here and in other towns in Punjab province, potential voters have hung their own election banners, demanding fair prices for gas and flour, or waved them at political rallies.

“Sugar is so expensive, it’s beyond the reach of people,” said Nasim Taqi, 45, a professor at a government community college in Gujar Khan. “Every basic necessity of life is not affordable. The true picture here is very, very deplorable.”