By Muhammad Umair Arif
Prime minister of Pakistan, Mr. Yousuf Gillani has asked his economic team, to prepare next year’s budget and this will be his government’s last budget in this tenure.
The highlight of his recent meeting with this economic team is, that the “budget must continue with the approach of preserving economic stability”. Given the extremely poor reputation for the last four years, continuing the same approach would push our economic situation down the drain. But offcourse, it is foolish to expect anything radical with this setup at all.
What I fail to understand is that if elections have to be held somewhere in October and if there is a CHANGE IN FACES in the parliament, budget for the future year has to be decided earlier..!
This is an immeasurable flaw in present system which ensures that the incompetent policies of the present government are going to go through the next parliament year. At the strategic horizon, hands of the NEW FACES in the parliament are already tied up. Simply the next government cannot increase the BUDGET of education or decrease the BUDGET of Armed forces or allocate money to tackle unemployment etc..!
This is an inherent problem in the democratic structure which guarantees that planning authority of the future government at strategic level is always limited so as to maintain the status quo. A bold example of this dilemma is Elections of the Upper house (Senate), which are done with this present regime, i.e. the present members of senate can rule over the future government and will have powers to reject any law which they deem is inappropriate for their welfare.
It explicitly seems the word CHANGE in this democratic setup is only limited to the faces and alliance of parliamentarians and not in REAL SOLUTIONS for our nation to progress and prosper. Our nation demands REAL CHANGE which can only be expected from a complete change of system.
For us Muslims, this evidently means a system i.e. Caliphate which includes the economic policies which we are comfortable with and which we believe in. Like interest free policies, gold backed currency, zakat, Ushr, No taxation on the poor etc. A system where laws are not verified by certain class of individuals in parliament or senate for their benefits, Today the consequences of such class centred laws are immunity for the president, poor Land reforms, American puppets, pathetic energy policy, privatization of national assets, different education standards etc. However the laws that framed Muslims as superpower of the world for 1400 years were Islamic Laws. Few consequences of Islamic Laws are real accountability of the Khalifa, free education, land distribution, independent foreign policy, energy and petrol as public property etc.
Thus system of Caliphate binds us to the perfect laws given by the Creator while democracy makes it certain that the group of people make laws and any CHANGE in this mechanism is strongly opposed by keeping checks like budget mechanism and Upper house elections. The irony is that we as Muslims, have left our glorious way of Leading the world. We have opted for optional systems like Democracy and dictatorships instead of the caliphate which is the reason of our miserable decline.
The highlight of his recent meeting with this economic team is, that the “budget must continue with the approach of preserving economic stability”. Given the extremely poor reputation for the last four years, continuing the same approach would push our economic situation down the drain. But offcourse, it is foolish to expect anything radical with this setup at all.
What I fail to understand is that if elections have to be held somewhere in October and if there is a CHANGE IN FACES in the parliament, budget for the future year has to be decided earlier..!
This is an immeasurable flaw in present system which ensures that the incompetent policies of the present government are going to go through the next parliament year. At the strategic horizon, hands of the NEW FACES in the parliament are already tied up. Simply the next government cannot increase the BUDGET of education or decrease the BUDGET of Armed forces or allocate money to tackle unemployment etc..!
This is an inherent problem in the democratic structure which guarantees that planning authority of the future government at strategic level is always limited so as to maintain the status quo. A bold example of this dilemma is Elections of the Upper house (Senate), which are done with this present regime, i.e. the present members of senate can rule over the future government and will have powers to reject any law which they deem is inappropriate for their welfare.
It explicitly seems the word CHANGE in this democratic setup is only limited to the faces and alliance of parliamentarians and not in REAL SOLUTIONS for our nation to progress and prosper. Our nation demands REAL CHANGE which can only be expected from a complete change of system.
For us Muslims, this evidently means a system i.e. Caliphate which includes the economic policies which we are comfortable with and which we believe in. Like interest free policies, gold backed currency, zakat, Ushr, No taxation on the poor etc. A system where laws are not verified by certain class of individuals in parliament or senate for their benefits, Today the consequences of such class centred laws are immunity for the president, poor Land reforms, American puppets, pathetic energy policy, privatization of national assets, different education standards etc. However the laws that framed Muslims as superpower of the world for 1400 years were Islamic Laws. Few consequences of Islamic Laws are real accountability of the Khalifa, free education, land distribution, independent foreign policy, energy and petrol as public property etc.
Thus system of Caliphate binds us to the perfect laws given by the Creator while democracy makes it certain that the group of people make laws and any CHANGE in this mechanism is strongly opposed by keeping checks like budget mechanism and Upper house elections. The irony is that we as Muslims, have left our glorious way of Leading the world. We have opted for optional systems like Democracy and dictatorships instead of the caliphate which is the reason of our miserable decline.
Muhammad Umair Arif is a Junior Lecturer at Bahria University, Karachi
agreed
ReplyDelete