Daily Times

With anti-monopoly and anti-trust laws in place, and relentless fighter in Prime Minister Imran Khan on the stage, how could feudal go manipulating our agriculture potential? What have been the cost benefit and ultimate price hike and shortage of sugar and wheat/atta etc? Why should people suffer on account of manipulations by the office holders, advisers and ministers of the government in power? If advisers and ministers get fired and Imran Khan shuffles cabinet, and Tareen is no more chairman of the task force on agriculture, what difference will it make for the people? Jahangir Khan Tareen has accused a senior bureaucrat of Prime Minister’s office for “victimizing” him, the tycoon under fire, by his own party as well as the opposition, for having “role” in the sugar scam. What is the point in Mr Tareen pointing the finger at the prime minister’s principal secretary? How does he come in, – the principal secretary to the PM? Jahangir Tareen declared that the report of FIA was political in nature and termed it as an attack on him.

The PTI government made public the report of the inquiry committee on the increase of sugar price that found several leading political figures as major beneficiaries of the “unjustified” sugar export policy of the government. Sources report there was no reason to export since sugar production had declined from 6.6 million tons in in 2017 – 18 to only 5.2 million tons that is reduction of 1.4 million tons in sugar. According to the source, the price of sugar was stable at Rs 55 per kg until Nov/ Dec 2018 but “this was unacceptable to power that be”. Thus export was allowed and price started moving up. The move to allow more export was understandable as a measure to rescue sugar industry.

The manipulation of human beings has a much longer history than the science of human relations. That science can now make it more efficient. But to use it in this way involves us in an unhappy paradox; for science historically has been, and from its nature should be, the way to break the power of manipulation, the dominance of one group over another.

This corruption case is a bad omen at the time when Pakistan and the rest of the world is busy fighting against the killer coronavirus

The physical sciences helped break the power of priestly and magical manipulation. The human sciences first entered the social arena on a major scale in the late 19th century, when historians, psychologists, and social thinkers worked toward transforming our society by demonstrating how it worked. To attempt to change society by giving men insight into its working would seem an infinitely more worthy task for science than to help try to preserve it by strengthening the power of manipulation.

The answer to the problem of the democratically controlled expert and the conscienceless manipulator is easy to state and almost impossible to realise. The “knowing” that people need is of a special kind; it is thinking scientifically and understanding some of the important results of scientific thinking.

To be sure, one does not know how a scientific and critical outlook on society, rare enough among scientists, can be cultivated so widely among people as to make manipulation for bad ends ineffectual, and all manipulation eventually unnecessary. But any such efforts are surely crucially valuable: popular writings on race and culture, and periodicals like the journal of social issues and ideas for action, in which social scientists experiment in presenting their results to larger social groups. The volume of such publications, in comparison with the prejudiced, stupid authoritarian and unscientific assertions that make up most of the content of mass media, it is infinitesimal. But it is all to the good.

The answers to the most important questions raised here may seem platitudinous. This only means they are still extremely vague. But these are the questions the human-relations scientists should consider if they are not to become – or remain – the unconscious perpetrators of forms of social life they intellectually oppose, the unconscious tools of forces that are intrinsically unscientific. Meaningful questions make an inquiry or scientific studies valid and reliable. Reliability and validity must be ensured in regulators work. The positive side of manipulation could be in the interest of all. That happens when the focus is on public interest and / or national interest.

It was good to note the prime minister breaking away from the regrettable tradition of political expediency and self-serving compromises that has come to define much of Pakistan’s history of governance. Imran Khan has taken a bold step in the right direction, ordering an independent inquiry into the sugar and wheat price hike despite immense pressure from within and outside his party. The Competition Commission of Pakistan and other concerned institutions need to be empowered to effectively deal with issues pertaining to collusion and monopolisation within key industries.

This corruption case is a bad omen at the time when Pakistan and the rest of the world is busy fighting against the killer coronavirus. Our initial reaction to covid-19 was “ostrich approach”, unfortunately.

The writer is former Director National Institute of Public Administration (NIPA) Government of Pakistan, a political analyst, a public policy expert, and a published author. His book post 9/11 Pakistan was published in the United States