Dealing with IDPs

Displacement is too insufficient and perhaps even meaningless a word to convey the traumatic experience of physical dislocation. Sudden dislocation under warlike situations carries the feeling of uncertainty looming large for the terrorised souls. Today, the north-western part of Pakistan is witness to such an excruciating social-psychological trauma. It also sees an unprecedented resilience of local social capital. 

In a real Kafkaesque situation, the internally displaced people do not know the crime whose punishment they have been condemned to bear. They do not know when their predicament will cease so that they can safely return, and with viable livelihood options. Perhaps the only worthwhile tool in the survival kit is hope. It is said: Prepare for the worst and hope for the best. Preparations for the worst are useless and inadequate when there are mostly inappropriate shelters and health facilities in many camps with limited or no food. The state of helplessness is painful. Many displaced persons have their wheat crop ready for harvesting but expensive and extremely dangerous return journeys put limit to their social wellbeing. 

Knowing the situation, the United Nations has asked for $440 million as immediate assistance for the people who have been uprooted during the war on terror. Beyond the immediate relief, early recovery needs much more than money. It puts the local social capital under a stringent test, along with the administrative capability of the state. In the absence of an explicit social policy, the most tested and bankable asset in Pakistan is the local social capital expressed through a magnificent show of solidarity with the people of Swat, Dir and Malakand. In fact, social capital is the Achilles’ heel of our social body which Talibanisation seeks to attack while creating political and social cleavages between and within the state and the society in the name of religion and sharia. 

The ghost of physical displacements keeps visiting Pakistan periodically. We met it in 1947, 1965, 1971 and 2005. Therefore, the experience of witnessing displacements is rich. What is inadequate is that level of administrative response, coordination, and information handling capacity which should have by now significantly strengthened. However, as an economist one can argue that Pakistan still needs to achieve a level of sustained economic growth which gives birth to social and political resilience in society and creates multiple levels of preventive capacity in the institutional arrangements of the state. 

However, as social policy experts argue, creating social protection and social development infrastructure has not been an activist-like concern of the state in Pakistan. It can be argued that lack of collectivist state-level concern disempowers societies and robs them of possible growth opportunities in managerial and technical capabilities to cope with both the natural and man-made disasters. 

The linkage between the welfare or developmental orientation of statecraft and availability of scientific information about people for targeting is simple. Theoretically, a government is accountable to the taxpayer. Money has to be utilised in a monitorable way. The target and processes must be transparent and activity result oriented. Therefore, person and location must be known both for public education and health. We lack this orientation in Pakistan. 

The ramifications of a lack of social security and protection polices and functional institutional arrangements are serious. For example, instead of mobilising educational and health departments for registration, the government of Sindh has been reported to start relying on the police. Without entering into a dispute over the need of registration, the politics of choice of office is the case in point. A commonsensical approach can inform that using police stations for registration of internally displaced persons will be harmful and create ethnic distensions in humanitarian work. Despite all good intentions, the regulation of displaced persons can degenerate into highhanded activity of law-enforcement agencies rather than a response of provincial social protection system. 

In the current disaster situation, the social capital or social capability which compensates for ineffectiveness of the state through charity and philanthropy is a valuable asset. In fact, under the circumstances, every penny counts and must be shared. The social arsenal of the nation must be well-quipped and efficiently deployed. 

Political society in Pakistan, while accommodating IDPs, should try to further build and enrich social capital rather than sabotaging it with political myopia. One good way of building social capital is to develop well-targeted disaster response capacity through the use of meticulously collected health and education data for development in normal times. This will add meaningful functional vitality to existing institutional arrangements such as NDMA and PDMAs. We should not forget that in disaster management it does matter whether you recognise 1.2 million or 2.2 million as displaced and scattered target population. In the longer term, social protection and security designed with precision is difficult but not impossible