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The crisis of institutions in Pakistan

by I A Rehman, 9 February 2009

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The News on Sunday, 8 February 2009

Institutions vs Individuals

The complaint that the institutions Pakistan once had have totally decayed and new institutions have not been raised has become a cliché many politicians use without comprehending the import of their statement. But these few words sum up Pakistan’s permanent crisis and the root cause of its people’s endless ordeal.

The trouble began at the very beginning. When Pakistan came into being it did have a few requisites of a developing collective – a large irrigation system, a good road-rail network, institutions of graduate, post-graduate and professional education, and a functional judiciary – but it was not a State. That is what Mr Jinnah meant when he referred to starting from scratch. The most critical deficiency was lack of social capital.

Power had been transferred to a Constituent Assembly and, as events revealed, it had a very sketchy idea of the task before it. The responsibility for overseeing the formation of the State vested in the Muslim League, a retarded entity; one man, the Quaid-i-Azam, accounted for 90 percent of its human capital and the remaining 10 percent was a mob of nodders, short on intelligence and long on selfishness.

Above all the task of establishing a State and at the same time managing day-to-day affairs fell on a group of people who did not have sufficient experience of public administration. (Those who had some experience in this field – Dr Khan Sahib in Frontier, the Unionists in the Punjab, the nationalists in Sindh, Suhrawardy in Bengal, and of course the non-Muslims everywhere were, for one reason or another, out of the scheme of governance.)

Neither the Muslim League nor the Constituent Assembly, the two supreme political institutions responsible for constructing the new State, realized sufficiently that the colonial edifice bequeathed by the British could not serve their purpose. Among other things, imposition of a unitary form of government on a country whose very raison d’etre was federalism was like subsisting on a poisonous diet. It was essential to replace the colonial structure with a model the new state-in-the-making needed for its ordered growth. Pakistan was almost undone over the nine years that it remained yoked under the Government of India Act of 1935 – an excellent instrument of governance for a colony but suicidal for a free Pakistan federation. During these nine years both the top institutions, the parliament and the party, were thoroughly destroyed.

There is no denying the grave financial and administrative problems as well as the consequences of an unclean partition that Pakistan’s early leaders had to contend with. But instead of finding solutions to the many crises confronting them through democratic means, the only safe path dictated by the nature of the new State and the short struggle for independence (in case of the Muslim League), they opted for arbitrary decision-making and sacrificed collective interest to self-aggrandisement.

The Quaid-i-Azam acted as soon as he could (December 1947) to cut the umbilical cord that tied Pakistan to the All-India Muslim League and the Pakistan Muslim League took the party standard. Contrary to his own inclination and despite Suhrawardy’s urging, he was persuaded not to open the party’s door to non-Muslims. Pakistan had to pay a huge price for this decision which blocked the possibility of the League’s becoming a truly national party. Worse, it helped the professional mujavers in its ranks to keep the two-nation theory alive even after its utility had been exhausted as pointed out by none other than the Quaid-i-Azam himself.

At the time of independence, the Muslim League was a mass of people who had faith in its sole leader. When that leader died the link between the masses and the party leadership snapped. It could never be repaired.

A brief attempt was made to save the party as an institution in its own right when it was decided that its president would be outside the government and Ch Khaliquzzaman was chosen as it head. Within a short time he was forced to resign and the presidentship of the League was permanently allotted to the head of the government. The masses were alienated and the party was reduced to a mafia of power-brokers and finally to a commercial enterprise.

The culture of party’s subservience to government spawned by the Muslim League in its various incarnations contaminated not only the parties born out of its womb, e-g. The Republican Party, Awami League and PPP, but also those with different parentages, e.g., ANP and its sibblings out of the late NAP.

The absence of genuine political parties facilitated the passage of power into the hands of bureaucrats first and the military later on. It played no small a part in the enforced secession of East Bengal and the alienation of the less populous provinces in the post-1971 Pakistan. Today Pakistan in sinking deeper and deeper in a marsh mainly because it is in the clutches of packs of self-seekers masquerading as democratic political parties.

The other founding institution – the parliament – fared no better.

Was the parliament consulted when Khwaja Nazimuddin succeeded the Quaid as the Governor-General and Liaquat Ali Khan as the Prime Minister or when he was booted out of office? Democracy was repeatedly stabbed in the first half of the 1950s when elections were rigged in the western provinces and the result of the 1954 poll in East Bengal was contemptuously rejected. To this day a fair election has not been possible. Blinded by self-interest, Ghulam Mohammad went to the extent of repudiating the State’s independence and then strangulated the parliament itself. The democratic pillars of the state were knocked down and the political superstructure had no better props than a contaminated judiciary and a politicised army. Thus, Ghulam Mohammad must be recognized as the principal wrecker of Pakistan’s fundamental institutions – he demolished the parliament, unhinged the judiciary from its moorings, destroyed the non-political character of the army, and undermined the federation by presiding over the mischief that the creation of One Unit was.

The self-styled saviours that tried to found new institutions were inherently incapable of reading the objective reality. Ayub Khan sacked democracy and while pretending to cleanse politics of corrupt elements he fostered the most corrupt element possible-autocracy. Yahya Khan rejected the path of democratic conciliation and drove the country to disintegration. Ziaul Haq mortgaged the State to militants and made the people’s faith controversial – all this in the course of a demonic war upon democrats and democratic institutions. Musharraf sought stability for himself at the cost of making the state more vulnerable than ever. And under all despotic regimes the executive organ of the state was defaced by being pushed higher than the other organs and freed of accountability.

In this story of the decline of the Pakistan State politicians like Z. A. Bhutto, Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif also figure and some of their doings cannot be glossed over. But they belong to a different category. Their main fault lay less in increasing the rot than in failure to stem the process.

Every political activist harps on the need to change the system. What he/she means is that the disintegration of the basic institutions of the state – the party, the parliament, the judiciary, the executive and the military – has affected, in varying degrees, all subsidiary institutions such as educational institutions, civil society organisations, professional guilds, trade and industry chambers, the trade unions, the media and its commentators who never stop pontificating (including the present writer), et al.

There is a very simple method of comparing an unstable state with a stable one. In a stable democracy fair elections produce a change only at the top, the rest of the system does not suffer a personnel change. In an unstable state, elections are not fair and the result is a change of personnel all along the line – department heads are changed, heads of official media organisations are changed, district police officers are replaced, and above all the qabza groups and commission agents that manipulate the sale of land and construction of plazas are replaced. Institutions are handed over to good-for-nothing courtiers, merit is derided and sychophancy rewarded.

Can anyone fail to see what Pakistan has become after six decades of a crusade against its people and their democratic rights?