The ‘law and order’ situation, as we know to our anguish, has become progressively unacceptable. However, our cigar-chomping, pot-bellied businessmen have only recently woken up to the fact that not all the money in their numbered accounts, nor all the Securicor guards outside their palatial homes, will protect them from the bomb blasts, kidnappings and dacoities which continuously puncture everyday life.
It is not sufficient to demand that as tax-payers they expect the government to be solely responsible for maintaining ‘law and order’. While their new-found determination to march on the streets against the rising crime rate is commendable, it is only one side of the coin.
For all the rights that citizens demand from government, there is a corresponding set of duties, obligations and responsibilities to society. On this score, however, a widespread perception exists that businessmen have failed to deliver on the expectations attendant upon their status as wealthy citizens of an impoverished country.
Take the matter of taxes. Less than 0.01% of Pakistanis pay taxes, while the underground economy approaches the equivalent of nearly 40% of GDP. Ponder the US$ 20 billion illegally stashed away abroad by Pakistanis. And then ask: how many deserving charities are funded by businessmen, how many hospitals and libraries built for the poor and middle-classes? How many philanthropists patronise the arts and science, build parks and playgrounds, schools and colleges? The fine examples are confined to a clutch of top industrialists in Karachi and Lahore. But as a social group our capitalists and traders have contributed pathetically little to the establishment of a creative, dynamic and stable civil society; instead, they have shirked their and responsibilities most callously.
The tragedy is compounded by the fact that businessmen have yet to realise they must put their general interests as a class before their particular interests as different groups pulling in so many narrow directions. It is this singular failing which explains why they flounder in articulating their common interests before an entrenched bureaucracy, a hostile press and a powerful feudal lobby.
It has also become a self-satisfying cliche to proclaim, ‘we are businessmen, we are not interested in politics’. This statement is more false than true. Yes, it is unfortunately true that businessmen don’t have a political party which manifestly extends their collective interests; yes, there is no press which promotes a liberal ideology necessary for nourishing the political culture in which industrialisation is historically rooted. But it is patently false because businessmen are nevertheless deeply involved in making political choices at all times: voting for candidates and parties, channelling funds to politicians, undermining hostile interests, bribing them to secure patronage and power. It is false also because businessmen have generally tended to support the political system of martial law and openly frowned upon representative government in the past.
In short, when they are confronted with political choices, businessmen are quick to make them, but they do so without collective wisdom and always with an opportunist eye to the short-term compulsions of making a quick buck and squandering it in conspicuous consumption.
As long as this attitude persists, all the businessmen’s advertisement campaigns in the press will amount to nothing and their concerns for the national good sound hollow. Instead of threatening to withhold taxes, businessmen should shoulder their historic responsibility to contribute more generously to society, participate more vigorously in representative government and gear themselves up to become the leading edge of a modern nation-state on the verge of the 21st century.