Author: Kunwar Idris
Publication: Dawn
Date: April 30, 2006
URL: http://www.dawn.com/2006/04/30/op.htm#2
The parliamentary form of government and a
permanent civil service were the common inheritance of India and Pakistan,
or their colonial legacy as we are wont to call it. Both institutions have
survived in India but not in Pakistan.
Obviously, the lifeline of the two is common
and runs through the acceptance (or at least acquiescence to) of the public
conduct of parliamentarians and civil servants by the people.
How the parliamentary system has been able
to sink roots in India despite the country's huge territory and enormous diversity
of races and religions, and why it hasn't been able to do so in a smaller,
more homogeneous Pakistan remains the subject of unending research and conjecture.
A simple explanation of it, however, is to be found in the fact that the permanent
civil service, which underpins the parliamentary system, has been purposely
and systematically dismantled in Pakistan since independence, except during
the first few years.
In the first decade of independence, though
political governments changed fast, state policies remained consistent and
economic progress steady. Yet the army commanders and technocrats of the time
determined that the parliamentary government did not provide the kind of confident
and durable leadership that the country needed in its formative years to confront
the enemies at the borders and to deal with restive elements at home. The
country, they argued, needed a strong leadership untrammelled by parliamentary
controls or bureaucratic red tape.
In pursuit of this plan the civil servants
became the first target of frequent and arbitrary purges. The political leaders
too, unwittingly, went along in the hope that a civil service that was not
a stickler for rules and propriety would help promote their personal and party
agenda. A sovereign parliament and a permanent civil service thus gradually
gave way to charismatic or corrupt leaders who drew their strength from the
commanders, if they came from the army, or from their party cadres or clansmen
if they were civilians. Ayub Khan, Ziaul Haq, Z.A. Bhutto, Benazir Bhutto,
Nawaz Sharif all of them to varying degrees came to use parliament as well
as the civil service as a seal of validity for their whimsical or dishonest
actions.
On the other hand, India without much ado,
chose to adhere to parliamentary traditions and, equally important, submitted
to the discipline of the colonial legacy of the permanent civil service. India's
prime minister Manmohan Singh put it across clearly to a thousand civil servants
comprising collectors / district magistrates (more familiar here as deputy
commissioners) who were summoned to Delhi for consultations spread over days.
Manmohan Singh deserves to be quoted at some
length from his hour-long concluding address on the occasion. He said: "One
has to reckon with the fact that all is not well with the way our political
system functions... Politics in a poor country has to mediate between societal
tensions that are built into the body dynamics of a poor society trying to
modernise itself... Many a time politics becomes an instrument of self-aggrandisement...
It is the duty of all of you... to steer our republic's ship in the desired
direction... You are the establishment in this country, you are the only people
who have secure tenures and who can therefore and are obliged to take a long
view of the evolution of our polity. Politicians come and go ... many times
they don't have the occasion to think about the long term consequences of
what they are doing..."
One may recall that the founder of Pakistan
had expressed similar thoughts half a century ago while addressing the newly-independent
state's civil servants. This is what Jinnah told them at Peshawar on April
14, 1948: "You should not be influenced by any political pressure, by
any political party or individual politician. Do your duty as servants to
the people and the state, fearlessly and honestly. Service is the backbone
of the state. Governments are formed, governments are defeated, prime ministers
come and go, ministers come and go, but you stay on, and, therefore, there
is a very great responsibility placed on your shoulders."
No army general or political leader in Pakistan
today feels persuaded, as Manmohan Singh does, to advise the civil servants
not to yield to political pressure for they all expect them to do their bidding.
Nor are the civil servants prepared to make any sacrifice for doing the right
thing as Jinnah said they must.
When Pakistani's Public Service Commission
insisted on following the rule of merit in the promotion of civil servants,
the commission with its chairman, who happened to be a general, and the members,
who were all senior civil servants, were sent home. Sindh's Public Service
Commission has closed down while the jobs of teachers, doctors, inspectors,
etc. running into thousands are being apportioned among the politicians in
preparation for the elections which the newly-appointed chief election commissioner
keeps assuring will be free and fair. Shouldn't he direct and then make sure
that no job is given except through a transparently fair competitive system?
Rigging, after all, does not mean casting bogus votes alone.
Manmohan Singh in his address to the civil
servants recalled what Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel had to say in the early years
of independence: "You will not have a united India if you do not have
a good all-India service which has the independence to speak out its mind
and which has a sense of security." Sardar Patel is not a loved name
to recall but Pakistan, perhaps, would not have been torn asunder if its public
servants then were more independent and secure to speak their minds. Now they
are neither independent nor secure and are not expected to speak out.
Notwithstanding the colonial character of
the British empire, Manmohan Singh told the Indian civil servants, it was
"an enterprise of great creativity. The administrative system it handed
down had served well and the civil service was a prized institution and a
proud legacy."
Compare that with the ideas (abbreviated here)
of General Musharraf, Pakistan's latter-day innovator, as expressed in the
bumbling jargon of his National Reconstruction Bureau: "The colonial
system of governance was rooted in a feudal-imperial system designed to seek
the twin ends of collection of land revenue and raising troops to fight an
adversary. The governance paradigm was that the interest of the crown must
never be sacrificed, the people's will or welfare were non-issues."
It is left to the people and historians to
judge the merits of the views of Manmohan Singh and Musharraf. The conditions
in both countries are open for all to see and draw their own conclusions.
In a recent interview on Pakistan TV, General
Musharraf conceded that he had left the task of reconstructing the civil service
to the next government for it was too cumbersome and controversial for him
to attempt and he had better things to do. He did not care to explain why
he had to demolish the civil service in the first instance. It is in the tradition
of Pakistan's politics that a ruler does whatever he likes and he cannot be
persuaded to do what he does not want to do.
