Master, servant

Few would dispute that men who ruled the earth throughout history were either men of knowledge or of power. The relationship is as valid today as it was centuries ago.
By extension the socio-economic classes that formed the realm of those rulers were also divided on the basis of their knowledge and power. Those who were educated, healthy and strong came out to be masters, and those weren’t the servants-–masters and servants being broadly conceived.
While Human Development Indicators (HDI) and MDG rankings are no measure of who has the most knowledge and who’s powerful and who’s not, the indicators do reflect the underlying conditions of any society-–incidentally mirroring how they are located in the master-servant relationship globally and at home.
For lack of space to print the world atlas, imagine the world map in your head and superimpose the HDI values on that map, and you will pretty much figure out who is the master and who is the servant in the global context.
Now run a similar exercise for the city you live in. There must be scores of uneducated people of poor health coming from shanty towns or low income areas to serve the proverbial masters in each respective city. Or, as migration data show, they move from low income districts to serve those in the high income districts.
The relationship also runs true from political standpoint in the context of Ian Talbot’s Punjabisation thesis, which in part is premised on the higher levels of education and physical strength of the people of the province. The just-released UNDP map here-–which summarises progress of MDGs–-shows how socio-economic disparities continue to grow between north and central Punjab, and the rest of the country.
But, while the rest of the country had bemoaned being political servants for many years, saying that their fate depended on political masters in north and central Punjab, the ball is now finally being tossed to their court–-albeit reluctantly. The devolution and the passing of local government acts are important breakthroughs in the direction that ‘promises’ to make the servants the masters of their own political and socio-economic fate.
However, what is really needed, as Prof Saeed Shafqat writes in the UNDP’s recently launched journal called Development Advocate, is the establishing of local governance arrangements through the devolution of adequate political, fiscal and administrative powers to local councils. Failure to do so would be paying mere lip service to the whole idea of having a local government.