ONE cannot watch Pakistan’s present predicament (بحرانی صورتحال) without tears, despondency(نا امیدی، بدحوصلگی), and a suicide note in one’s pocket.
Soon, in another two months, Prime Minister Imran Khan’s PTI government will be completing its first year in power. There will be a predictable cacophony (شور و غوغا)of praise lauding(تعریف کرنا) its achievements, its successes, its commitment to the causes of the people. Few will dare recall the electoral promises (still unfulfilled) made with such passion. Few will question the dyslexic (نا سمجھی پر مبنی) manner in which various arms of the government function, often at odds with each other. Few will realise that gradually the iron grid that sustains every government from within — the Civil Service and the Rules of Business — is now irreversibly rusted.
Previous governments — especially the PPP and the PML-N under any brother — paid scant(معمولی اور ضرورت سے کم) attention to the discipline imposed by the Rules of Business. Mr Asif Ali Zardari is known to have used Post-it notes to convey his orders. As soon as they were carried out, the notes were destroyed, leaving no record on the file. The Sharif brothers preferred the mediaeval approach. Orders were issued verbally. No historian will find a notation signed by prime minister Nawaz Sharif authorising the then director general, civil aviation, in 1999 to divert the PIA aircraft craft carrying COAS Gen Musharraf to India. Not even on a Post-it.
The civil service was once regarded as a breed of uber-patriots (بہترین درجے کے محب وطن), those who never lost sight of the national interest even when elected or military governments did. Gradually, that focus has developed cataracts بینائی سے محروم. The Service has been all too willing to be led — half-blind — towards any decision that needed to be made. How else can one explain the obedience of bureaucrats (who should have known better) to the ill-conceived and now incomplete Orange Line project that has disfigured Lahore’s visage شکل یا چہرہ forever?
One would need to search graveyards to find examples of bold bureaucrats like Qamar-ul-Islam. In 1969, as deputy chairman Planning Commission, he was ‘ordered’ by Air Marshal Nur Khan (then deputy chief martial law administrator) to prepare a ‘National Plan’ for the new government. “Do you want a short-term one or a long-term one?” Qamar-ul-Islam replied.
Is it to be government by diktat اپنے سینئر سے ہدایات لیکر کام کرنا?
“What’s the difference?” asked Nur Khan. The bureaucrat responded: “It depends on how long you intend to stay in power.”
Prime Minister Imran Khan has four more years in power, at least. So far he has not given any indication of the sort of Pakistan he would like to see in place by 2023. Is it still to be a federation? Or will its four major provinces like points on a compass, inimical غیر دوستانہ to each other, face in four different directions?
Is it to be a government accountable to parliament? The condescending attitude (تحکمانہ رویہ)of the ruling PTI and the immature misbehaviour of the opposition have converted the National Assembly into a mud-wrestling pit from which no-one emerges clean.
Is it to be government by diktat? Many believe that is Imran Khan’s preferred style. Yet, he allows such latitude(جگہ) to his subordinates. Take the IMF negotiations. Former minister Asad Umar would open his mouth to put his other foot in, until even his boss lost patience or was told by the IMF to replace him.
Now, unexpectedly, Makhdum Khusro Bakhtiyar (planning and development minister) and Dr Abdul Hafeez Shaikh (adviser to the prime minister on finance) both made announcements that the Asian Development Bank was providing the government with $3.4 billion as ‘budgetary support’. Such disclosures are normally made with mutual consent and only after the negotiations have reached a pre-board level of finality. The Asian Development Bank was not amused. Its Islamabad office over a weekend issued a stinging disclaimer. Is there no end to the number of rebukes(طعنے یا تذلیل کے الفاظ) we are to endure as a nation?
Apparently not. Indian Prime Minister Modi dismissed Prime Minister Imran Khan’s peace overtures (ابتدائی اقدامات) as ‘paper kisses’ and effectively ignored him at the SCO summit at Bishkek recently. There, Mr Khan pulled out a speech replete with clichés. He invited the SCO members to invest in Pakistan. Someone at the Foreign Office should have advised him that, of its members, China already has invested more than it should, India never will, Russia has no intention to, and the ‘-stans’ have not forgotten the fate of the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline.
It is such gaffes (ریمارکس جو سوچے سمجھے نہ ہوں)— whether in Riyadh or in Bishkek — that are diminishing our status as a power with the common sense to match our resources. Merely being a nuclear power is no protection against such acts of national hara-kiri (خود کشی: جاپانی اصطلاح).
The public had hoped that the 2019-20 budget would be a blueprint of the PTI government’s economic plans — however short-term. Instead, this budget will be equitable only in that it will hurt everyone and benefit no one.
The Pakistani public has no option but to endure. The PTI government has no option but to govern with more palpable (جسے محسوس کیا جاسکے) maturity.
The writer is an author.
www.fsaijazuddin.pk
Published in Dawn, June 20th, 2019
COLUMN 2
IT begins already, the steady process of diluting the influence of Imran Khan on the executive powers of the state. A few weeks back I said he has become a “figurehead prime minister”, and on budget night he showed himself to be so totally separated from the conduct of economic policy that this week’s conclusion was nearly inevitable: the formation of a National Development Council.
One can be forgiven for feeling a little disoriented with the proliferation (پھیلاو) of all the councils thus far. But this last one is different because it has the army chief on it, unlike the others.
What we are witnessing today is a continuation of a search for an agreeable model for configuring (پروگرامنگ کرنا) and wielding (اپنے قبضے میں لینا) executive powers that began perhaps as far back as the early Zia years. Those more learned than me might well be able to trace the line further back. It is born of a tension built into the nature of civil-military relations.
Accumulating power at the top involves managing two major spheres of activity: politics and executive power. Politics in this country pits the ruler against the political parties, whether they are in acquiescent (تعاون کرنے کی حالت میں) mode (like they were through the Musharraf years as they sat in his parliament) or in street-fighting mode (as they were in the Zia years). When not faced off against a military regime, the parties have been faced off against each other.
Managing politics has a fairly standard template (نمونہ) by now. A relatively straight line runs from the IJI to the PML-Q to the PTI today. When you have a political prime minister, like Mohammad Khan Junejo, it becomes hard to control how he will discharge his executive functions, whether in budgeting, taxation and spending or in foreign policy.
When you have a non-political prime minister, like Shaukat Aziz, the discharge of the state’s executive functions remains soundly under control. But Aziz could provide little to no help when Musharraf faced his big political challenges, when pressing on with accountability, or in negotiating an extension of his term in office under uniform, or when the Supreme Court began challenging his decisions starting with the privatisation programme, or when the lawyers movement broke out, or when the NRO had to be negotiated or the PML-Q had to be asked to secure a vote from the Assembly granting Musharraf another five years in power after 2008 and so on and on.
This is one balance for which an active but fruitless search has been under way for decades in Pakistan. A prime minister who is accountable only to his political party does not work in such a setup. Not a single one of those types — who recognize only their party leadership as their overlords — has managed to finish a term in office.
Think about all the various times a prime minister has been sent packing from parliament in our history from Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to date. There is only one example when this was attempted (not successfully, mind you) using the instruments the Constitution gives for dislodging a prime minister or a government: a vote of no-confidence. That was in 1989, with the combined opposition parties, who left Benazir Bhutto’s government hobbled (زخمی اور حالتِ غیر میں) but in place.
Other than that, I count 10 other occasions when a prime minister has been sent home involuntarily غیر رضاکارانہ طور پر. In only two of those 10 cases were troop movements involved (ZAB and Nawaz Sharif’s second stint). Junejo was struck down with the stroke of a pen and a constitutional amendment that his own parliament had debated and passed.
The next three governments (PPP, PML, PPP) were all sent home using the same instrument of presidential power. Yousuf Raza Gilani and Nawaz Sharif in 2016 were both sent home by the Supreme Court, directly. Nawaz Sharif’s first term ended first with his dismissal by the president, then his restoration by the Supreme Court, followed by his agreeing to step down in an agreement brokered (مصالحت کروانا) by then COAS Gen Waheed Kakar.
When recalling this noisy and tumultuous (اونچ نیچ سے بھری ہوئی) history it is easy to overlook the case of Zafarullah Jamali, who stepped down without a peep simply because he was asked to. It was his sheer inability to discharge the executive functions of the state as well as his inability to be useful in the robust politics that emerged from the 2002 elections that paved his way out of the Prime Minister House. Of all the prime minister’s discussed in this brief overview, his was the shortest stint at 581 days, not even two years, and the quietest departure. This was also the first time that a prime minister was removed but the government left intact. In the years to come, this was done twice more with Gilani and Sharif.
Today it is becoming increasingly important to ask whether Imran Khan is able to manage the politics of the moment or discharge the executive functions of the state. For the former it is necessary to understand what sort of end point is envisioned in the ongoing political confrontation that sees the parties in an intensifying clash with each other. For the latter the real, hard metric is the ability of the government to jump through the hoops set by the IMF.
Beyond this they have to manage a growing regional engagement under an extremely trying scenario that is becoming increasingly critical. There is a reason why the prime minister is repeatedly writing letters to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi asking for talks, and the reason is not a fatuous (احمقانہ) one. Notice that, of the four terms of reference given for the newly formed council, two relate to regional connectivity and cooperation.
The formation of the council shows that there is growing concern about the discharge of executive functions of the state at present. A leadership vacuum is being filled. Of course, it won’t work, because executive power cannot be run on a part-time basis. When that becomes clear, the key decision point will arrive.
The writer is a member of staff.
khurram.husain@gmail.com
Twitter: @khurramhusain
Published in Dawn, June 20th, 2019
