V V: Is Pakistan governable?

The recent killing of Osama bin Laden on the outskirts of Abbottabad on the North-West Frontier Province, the raid on the naval base near Karachi and the almost daily suicide bombings raise fresh questions about the nature and destiny of Pakistan. For some commentators it provides additional proof that Pakistan is a “failed state”, too weak and too fragmented to know, let alone to control, what’s going on within its borders. For some others, especially to us in India, it is indicative of how Islamic doctrines and jihadist philosophies have eaten away at the fabric of Pakistan. So, the question is whether Pakistan is governable any more. Ilhan Niaz, an assistant professor of history at Qaid-ed-Azam University, Islamabad, has come with The Culture of Power and Governance of Pakistan, 1947-2008 (Oxford University Press, Karachi, Rs 750), which is perhaps the first theoretical study on the nature of Pakistani state, unlike a spate of others that have been empirical accounts to describe the stranglehold of the military in every aspect of Pakistan’s life and times.

 

Let it be said that as a theoretical study of the crisis of governance, the work is seriously flawed. But before that, a little on the book itself which attempts to explain Pakistan’s crisis in historical and philosophical terms. It argues that South Asia’s indigenous orientation towards the exercise of power has reasserted itself and produced a regression in the behaviour of the ruling elite. This has meant that in the 60 years of independence from the British rule the behaviour of ruling elite has become more arbitrary. This has resulted in the deterioration of the intellectual and moral quality of the state apparatus.

Having made these broad generalisations, Dr Niaz draws upon his reading of history — the pattern of governance under emperors in Europe and South Asia, for example, under the Mauryan and Mughal empires which he describes as “continental bureaucratic empires”. In this system, the emperors considered the state their private property and depended upon the bureaucracy for administering a vast country. If the ruler weakened, the servants or the bureaucrats carved out personal estates for themselves, thus leading to anarchy. If the ruler was strong, smaller states were fused to form a larger state.

Dr Niaz’s main thrust has been on personalities – rulers, bureaucrats, the military and financial managers – not on objective factors, or underlying forces that often dictate the decisions of policy makers.

Dr Niaz’s monolithic model of strong rulers vs weak rulers is carried over to the post-Independence scene in Pakistan: the rulers while exercising power have “steadily regressed” to pre-British forms with no stable institutions of governance. Dr Naiz praises the British rule precisely because of the establishment of institutions and the introduction of modern systems of governance like regular pay, accountability, esprit de corps in the services and so on. These principles of governance steadily eroded to the extent that Lal Masjid challenged the writ of Islamabad in 2007, and in 2009 the Taliban militants consolidated their hold over a large part of the Khyber regions or Pakhtunkhwa.

But this erosion of state authority had been coming for a long time. Immediately after Independence in 1947, senior civil servants were “quietly working themselves to death” for restructuring the state. Between March 1953 and March 1969, when Pakistan was governed by civil servants and military officers, backed by the judiciary, “there was undeniable improvement in the efficiency of the administration as police had receded into the background”.

But this triumvirate slowly collapsed because the chosen legislators were perceived to be interfering with the police and the military that led to lawlessness and corruption. Dr Niaz gives a blow-by-blow account of the erosion of judicial powers and the emasculation of civil authority beginning with Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto to he “authoritarian rule at its worst” that climaxed under Zia-ul-Haq. Dr Niaz emphasises that while Zia’s rule ensured stability, the society became increasingly ungovernable as resources from home and abroad were poured into religious seminaries and arming, training and launching Islamic militants in Afghanistan.

What the military and political elite did was to destroy the institutions of governance, that is, the constituent assembly, the local governments, the higher judiciary and political parties. This created a power vacuum to be filled by whoever wielded the gun. Both military and military leadership failed to see the difference between a modern state and a medieval one in which the country was taken as the estate of the ruler. And when it came to finance, it highlighted the inability of the state to increase revenues. The “macro-economic stability was an illusion” since it was not backed by the ability of the state to “generate revenues from its domestic sources”.

Dr Niaz is right up to a point. But there are two other crucial factors responsible for the misgovernance of Pakistan and both are something about which the state can do nothing. One, the overwhelming role of the army that has a finger in every pie — land, industry and now the service sector. And two, the Talibanisation of Pakistani society that can’t see anything beyond a very rigid interpretation of Islam. So, no institutional reform will bring about any change.