Editorial: The Express Tribune - 27 June 2013

Attack on judge’s convoy

The law and order situation in the country’s financial hub continues to deteriorate with yet another bomb blast rocking Karachi on the morning of June 26. The convoy of the Sindh High Court Justice Baqar Maqbool was the target of the explosion that took place in the Burns Road area of the city. The bomb was planted on a motorbike that was parked near a mosque, which exploded as the convoy passed by, killing 12 people and injuring 14 others. Thankfully, Justice Maqbool, who is currently performing duties as the acting chief justice of the Sindh High Court, escaped only with injuries.
The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan have accepted responsibility for the attack, stating that Justice Maqbool was targeted for his “anti-Taliban and anti-mujahideen decisions”. Our law-enforcement agencies have clearly failed to fulfil their responsibility of ensuring peace in Karachi. The obvious weaknesses in the law-enforcement apparatus — which not only fails to gather intelligence and pre-empt such attacks by infiltrating into terror networks, but also fails to apprehend the perpetrators of these crimes after they have taken place — point to the lack of political will to rectify this state of affairs. It is well known that the police in Sindh need to be depoliticised and provided with sufficient resources to deal with the Herculean task of ensuring peace. The justice system also needs to develop the capacity to convict those who have been arrested for being involved in terrorism and other subversive activities. This will only happen when the police employ modern investigation methods that help in gathering irrefutable evidence, which can stand in a court of law.
During the last five years, targeted killings, suicide attacks, sectarian and political violence in Karachi went on unabated. It remains to be seen if the provincial PPP government is able to reform the security situation this time around. It will have to take other political parties of the province on board if it wants to find a long-term solution to this menace. A unified stance on terrorism and the will to deal with it effectively is needed if peace is to be established. A peaceful Karachi is crucial for the economic well-being of Pakistan; therefore, the PML-N government at the centre must also extend its complete support to the provincial government in this regard.

More bureaucracy

The federal bureaucracy has only one answer to every problem in the country: more bureaucracy. When the finance minister announced that the government wanted to give the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) the power to access banking data of every person in Pakistan, we, along with the Senate finance committee and a large majority of the country’s business community, reacted with concern. It is understandable that the FBR will need data to crack down on tax evasion. But we did express our view that not enough safeguards for privacy were built into the system.
After apparently having mulled over the matter for several days, the FBR has an answer: only its chairman and board members will be granted access to banking data. Is that really the solution to this issue? Granting the power to access data to the FBR where there is massive scope for the data to be misused, while not giving the power to the NADRA data analysts, who are actually creating the algorithm designed to track down tax evaders and estimate their tax liabilities? This so-called solution only serves to exacerbate the impression that the FBR does not really want the data to go after tax evaders, but simply to use it to allow corrupt officials to blackmail people with substantial sums of money.
The theory behind the need for the bank account data being made accessible to the FBR was to allow it to complete the algorithm it is trying to construct that would not only identify potential tax evaders, but also estimate accurately how much they should be paying in taxes. It is an attempt to use Big Data the right way. The algorithm, however, is not being constructed by the FBR. It is being constructed by NADRA, an institution that has a much better track record of handling people’s personal data and, therefore, has a much better public profile. If the finance minister is serious about catching tax evaders, he would do well to hand over the data to NADRA, which the public trusts, and not the FBR, where this information can be misused.