IT was the morning of June 18, third Sunday of the month. My daughter called to wish me a “great day.” A couple of hours later, my two sons took me and their mother out to lunch. Why the fuss? It was “Father’s Day” in America. Contrary to the general impression, merchants, eager to boost their sales and profits, are not the ones who brought the “Father’s Day” into vogue.

A man in the state of Washington, William Smart, whose wife had died in childbirth, raised his six children as a single parent. Much later one of his daughters, Sonora, decided that his selflessness and dedication in this role deserved to be celebrated. She proposed the idea of a “Father’s Day,” which was well received. First celebrated in Spokane, Washington, in 1910, it soon spread to the rest of the country. In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson signed a proclamation, giving the third Sunday in June official recognition as Father’s Day.

I had never heard of the Father’s Day in India or Pakistan, and I was surprised to see both of them listed among more than 60 countries where it is celebrated, and in half of them on the same day as in America.

Neither fathers nor sons are all equally commendable. One can be both lavish and niggardly in assessing their strengths. Queen Victoria’s love and admiration for her husband, Prince Albert, were well known. Her admonition to her children concerning their father makes interesting reading:

“None of you can ever be proud enough of being the child of such a father, who has not his equal in this world — so great, so good, so faultless. Try, all of you, to follow in his footsteps and don’t be discouraged, for really like him in everything none of you, I am sure, will ever be. Try, therefore, to be like him in some points, and you will have acquired a great deal.” (I wonder if her son (later King Edward VII) thought of his father the same way.)

I should like to recall a son’s beautiful compliment to his father, who was not a prince but a manual worker, coming from Mario Cuomo, a renowned American politician and former governor of New York state: “I watched a small man with thick calluses on both hands work 15 hours a day; I saw him once literally bleed from the bottoms of his feet, a man who came here uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language, who taught me all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence of his example.”

In many societies, both ancient and contemporary, sons have occupied a special place in that they have been seen as the carriers of their family’s line and name and thus, in a manner of speaking, as an answer to one’s quest for immortality. Considerations such as this led husbands to divorce their wives if they failed to give birth to sons.

The following statements are based on study and my personal observation of the American scene. Needless to say, they do not apply equally well to all families. They should, therefore, be taken as statements of tendencies and inclinations, not as firm laws of behaviour.

Raising children can be one of the central experiences of a man’s life, a source of pride and joy. But it can also bring frustrations to both parties. Sons will, hopefully, adopt their family’s beliefs, values, and to some degree, aspects of its inherited culture. Does a father normally want his son to be like him? Yes and no. Beyond beliefs and values, it may depend on how successful he has been in acquiring the means of well-being. We can be sure that Governor Cuomo’s father was infinitely pleased to see that his son did not end up as a semi-skilled factory worker like him.

But if sons are to take anything from their fathers at all, a certain amount of togetherness between them must take place. This was not much of a problem when home and workplace were the same, and both father and son were within each other’s reach much of the time. That situation has changed since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, particularly the advent of the automobile and rapid public transportation systems. Since then, men, notably those in urban centres, have been going out to work in factories and commercial establishments. They are away from home the entire day. This leaves little time for togetherness between father and son.

With each passing generation during the last 200 years fathers have passed on less and less to their sons — less power, less wisdom, less love. A stage has been reached where some fathers become irrelevant to the lives of their sons. They also have less authority than their predecessors did. The very concept of fatherhood has been changing. Fathers are increasingly seen as providers than as nurturers. They make money and bring things home.

In many instances, work became the father’s consuming passion. He felt his family should understand that its claims on his time must take a second place to his need to rise in the esteem of his peers and superiors at work. This change in his role had two consequences. His sons could boast of him among their own peers if he had become eminently successful. But since he had always been the one to discipline the boys, his professional success and the power that came with it made him a tyrant at home — feared and resented. On the other hand, he fell in his family’s esteem, even became an object of ridicule, if he had failed to do well at work and fallen short of expectations as a provider.

Still another consequence of the father’s inability or disinclination to find “quality time” for his family should be noted. Boys began to grow up, in effect, without fathers. With the emergence of the small, “nuclear” family (father, mother, and children), with no grandfather or uncles in the house, they were left without a role model. Yet, they needed a father’s protection and nurturing. Life for many of them, even after they had become grown men, became a frustrating search for a lost father. This deprivation turned some of them to drugs, excessive drinking, womanising, lack of interest in work and ambition to succeed.

Masculinity passes from father to son. It is not something the mother can impart no matter how great a person she is. It is the father who helps the adolescent boy become “man enough” to cope with an uncaring world that keeps delivering an unceasing array of tough situations.

There are indications of a change in the trend explained above. Couples that do not have children of their own want to have some, not simply for the sake of having them but to raise them, be with them, and spend quality time with them. It is being recognised that a good father must be willing to give of himself, be there for his son, applaud his successes and comfort him in his failures. Note also that a son observes his father and in certain situations may want to be like him (at least in some respects). The father should, therefore, act accordingly.

The son needs expressions of his father’s approval and it should be forthcoming in both good and bad times. There is the greater possibility of their coming closer, even becoming friends, if the father can share some of his son’s interests, if for instance they can play tennis, fly kites, or go fishing together.

I am not well acquainted with the present state of the father-son relationship in Pakistan. It is possible that in some respects it is the same as it was in the days when I was growing up. No single universally applicable pattern prevailed even then. Also noteworthy is the fact that boys born of the same parents, and raised in the same home, turned out to be very different men. Their personality formation depended not only on their home environment but on their genes and coincidences such as the teachers they got in school and the friends they made, Once again, therefore, we can only speak of the more general tendencies in this regard.

There was no tradition of father and son sitting down and chatting together. Hardly ever would they discuss issues; disputing the father’s position would be regarded as gross impertinence. Moreover, there wasn’t much contact between them. They might see each other at the dining table, in homes where the family customarily gathered together for dinner, at which time the father might ask the son how his studies were going to which he would usually say they were going well. The father, might, on occasion, call in the son for a bit of advice or scolding if he had been doing something disreputable. For the most part, however, they lived in their separate worlds.

In Pakistan, as in most other societies, sons during their adolescent years, and in some cases even later, tended to be defiant, even rebellious, when they were asked to desist from doing what they wanted to do. In these situations, the father didn’t always know how to respond. Shouting at his son, or hitting him, did not always help. It was not customary to throw him out, and more often the father had to learn to live with his anguish.

Some of the tension in this relationship resulted from the “generation gap.” The world in which the son lived — its criteria of judgment, demands, expectations, trends, and fashions — was not the same as that of the father when he was a young fellow. Often the sons felt their fathers did not understand their evolving material and cultural environment, and that their attitudes and outlook were obsolete.

Even the once rebellious son showed his father deference when he became old and fragile, but his reluctance to take advice remained. The father on his part never stopped worrying over the son’s problems, real and imagined. Fatherhood was, and still is, an occupation from which one never retires.

Email: anwarsyed@cox.net

THE current debate on amendments to the Constitution and the form of government is power play for some and an intellectual pastime for others. To the people at large, with their lives plagued by insecurity and unemployment, it signifies little.

No doubt, the Constitution is the basic law of the land. But what helps or hurts the common man are laws and rules made under the Constitution and the intentions of the men administering them.

Invariably, the common man in Pakistan gets a raw deal because the laws are enacted mostly through ordinances and executive orders and later rubber-stamped by parliament. When it comes to making rules even that formality is dispensed with. These are the handiwork of the executive alone.

When it comes to the application of the laws and rules, the rights of the common man are more often jeopardised than vindicated. The unwary and innocent suffer persecution when they deserve protection. Offences relating to blasphemy, the desecration of the Holy Quran and adultery (or rape) appropriately illustrate this travesty of the law. The accused, who may be innocent, falls victim to blind public rage, and is killed. In other cases, the accused is imprisoned for years by the authorities before being tried in a court of law.

In one of the few blasphemy cases that actually went up for trial, the Mianwali sessions court held that the police had acted dishonestly in registering the complaint and that the complainant had used the name of the Holy Prophet (PBUH) to settle a personal score. Still, four youth of a family spent four years in jail before the verdict of their innocence was pronounced.

That a constitution, whatever its form and howsoever worthy its objectives, cannot prevent the abuse of laws or procedures is borne out by an on-going episode in the ministry of law, justice and human rights. The functions of this ministry, as indeed of all ministries, are undertaken in accordance with the Rules of Business which were framed under the 1973 Constitution in its original form. The later amendments cannot be blamed for what is happening now.

It appears from press reports that this ministry gets a special fund to compensate victims of torture and rape and those bereaved by the extrajudicial killings. The auditor-general had detected that 305 out of a total 365 recipients of aid from this fund belonged to the constituency of the minister in charge of the ministry, Wasi Zafar. The ministers private secretary sends a list of persons to be helped to the senior joint secretary in charge of the human rights division, Ms Saira Karim. She obliged last year but did not this time. Infuriated, the minister was contemplating serious action against her when the scandal came to light.

The work in the federal government is regulated by the Rules of Business framed under Articles 90 and 99 of the Constitution. Thus they have the force of law. Both the minister and the joint secretary, in disbursing the human rights funds, had been acting in violation of not just the statutory rules but, more reprehensibly, of the basic standards of propriety and honesty expected of any citizen, not to speak of highly placed public servants.

This irregularity has a special poignancy to it because the funds meant for victims have gone to cronies, but the fact of the matter is that the business of the government is hardly ever conducted in accordance with the rules.

In the days before 1973, the basic rule of propriety and responsibility in conducting routine government business (other than matters pertaining to high policy and legislation) was simple and clear. The secretary was accountable for whatever happened in his ministry, he had to keep the minister informed, who, in turn, was required to keep the prime minister informed. Where a difference of opinion arose between the secretary and the minister, the file had to be submitted to the prime minister whose decision was binding on both.

In the exhilaration of their unexpected and sweeping victory, the People’s Party ministers found it unacceptable that they couldn’t overrule the secretary or make him do whatever they thought was required to be done for self-gratification or to fulfil the unrealistic promises they had made to the people in the heat of the campaign.

The rule was, therefore, amended, in essence enabling the minister to do whatever he wanted to do. That, by and large, remains the position even today. By virtue of an amendment made in 1998, the secretary can now seek the intervention of the prime minister, but only when he feels his minister is “manifestly wrong” or his actions are causing “gross injustice”.

Hardly has a secretary ever invoked this provision of the rules. He is got rid of before he can do so. The extent to which the actions of a minister conform to the rules is thus determined by his own conscience or the indulgence, or lack of it, shown by the prime minister or the president. The secretary and the other officials have no choice but to collude, look the other way or squirm and quit.

With the Rules of Business as they stand, this is what the ministers at various times had to tell the secretaries of their ministries or the heads of the attached organisations. (The following three examples have been chosen at random).

Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain when he was minister of production in Ziaul Haq’s government: ‘Follow the rules but help my men’.

Jam Sadiq Ali: ‘I will give orders in writing in whatever manner you want and always own them, but do not question their propriety’.

Khaqan Abbasi, minister for production under Ziaul Haq: ‘Disregard or question my orders if they are improper or contrary to public policy’.

Chaudhry Shujaat’s view holds the field today as it has been doing over the past 35 years. The ministers — central and provincial — have been freely helping their men to become policemen, teachers and doctors, and that explains the sad state of law and order, education and public health.

The first and necessary step towards good governance is to amend the Rules of Business. Amendments to the Constitution can be debated till the cows come home.