ONE question raised in the correspondence columns of our newspapers and also heard otherwise following the killing of Sardar Bugti is what should the state have done when its power was being so openly defied? Should it have sat quietly and let the sardar get away with it? The implication is that the use of force to control or eliminate Nawab Bugti was legitimate and those criticising it are a confused lot who need to get their moral and political bearings right.

It is true that the Baloch leader had been in a state of almost open rebellion for months. But even during this period, in the early days, he had agreed to a dialogue with Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain and Mr Mushahid Hussain. During the last weeks of his life he had retreated into a cave in a remote area. He has been described as a blackmailer who used to extract money from the centre and received regular pay-offs from the Sui Gas people. It is alleged that he did not share the money he got with his own tribesmen nor with the people of the area.

It has even been said — with the kind of heartlessness that has come to characterise our attitude in such matters — that it was Bugti’s men who had stage-managed the assault on Dr Shazia Khalid and then pinned the blame on an army officer. The president’s helicopter was also fired upon in Balochistan, reportedly at Bugti’s instigation and by his supporters.

There may be other instances of rebellious behaviour that can be dug out from Nawab Bugti’s past. The entire tribal and feudal system of which Bugti was a manifestation is cruel, oppressive and exploitative and deserves no sympathy. Let us, for argument’s sake, accept all this and also that Bugti had embarked on a course where he deserved to be punished. He had challenged the writ of the state and taken up arms against it. He had raised his own militia and apparently was well supplied with arms and ammunition. If in the exercise of the state’s authority, he was killed, he only got his just deserts.

So, we accept this line of reasoning. But then we come up against a small problem. Who is supposed to exercise the writ of the state and decide the manner in which it is to be enforced? Who can order military action and air strikes against a group believed to be in revolt against the state? In a state considered to be democratic, surely its authority can only be exercised on its behalf by a representative government and an elected parliament, or can there be any doubt about that? We have in theory an elected government that, along with its allies, commands a majority in parliament, however contrived. Was the military operation in Balochistan an outcome of a decision taken by the government of Mr Shaukat Aziz and endorsed by parliament? Or did the military, under General Pervez Musharraf, decide to undertake the operation on its own and Mr Aziz just went along with it? We know for a fact that parliament was not consulted. Information about the final moves that led to Mr Bugti’s killing was in all probability not even conveyed to the government. In other words, Gen Musharraf and the military, who enjoy no really elected or representative status and cannot be presumed by any stretch of the imagination to be in a legal or moral position to decide on such moves by themselves, chose to exercise authority on behalf of the state.

The same thing had happened in 1971 when an unelected military government decided to launch a military operation against the Awami League and its leader Shaikh Mujibur Rahman (Yahya Khan had the sense not to order the physical elimination of Mujibur Rahman but had him arrested and brought to West Pakistan) when they had refused to reach a compromise with the army high command. The whole chain of events set in motion to face Mujibur Rahman’s defiance was arguably as illegal as the course adopted by the Awami League leader.

When Mr Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had ordered military action in Balochistan (in which Mr Bugti was a willing pawn), he probably had greater legitimacy for doing so as an elected prime minister, although his grounds were perhaps as politically and morally dubious as of Ayub Khan before him and Gen Musharraf after him. (Incidentally, Mr Bhutto hadn’t even defied the authority of the state, and yet a military dictator decided that he had to be charged with murder and executed — and of course that dictator too claimed he was acting on behalf of the state.)

Unfortunately, therefore, we again come up against the problem of legitimacy posed by military interventions and military-led governments. We may tend to ignore this problem and justify it on several counts, not least the doctrine of necessity.

We may have to live with it. But that does not mean that we necessarily have to accept it as correct. If we began to be so practical, then there will be no morality or principles left in life.

No unelected institution or group of people can arrogate to themselves the right to take decisions on behalf of a democratic state, and to question their right to do so is not just a namby-pamby liberal foible but a matter of principle. We may not be able to do much about it, but to accept this position without demur or reservation would be to abandon our belief in democracy.

Flowing from this is another small matter: was Bugti acting against the state or against the government of the day? This distinction has been blurred in Pakistan from day one, and seems no closer to a resolution. Every government that comes into power believes that it is the state and therefore any action against the government is an action against the state, thus subversive and treasonable. This confusion has hounded us for nearly six decades, and we continue to label people as patriots or miscreants as our politics goes from day to day.

Those who were advocating a political accommodation with Mujibur Rahman and the need to accept the verdict of the majority and were dubbed as Indian agents were, as events have proved, more patriotic, more concerned about the state of Pakistan than those who subverted democracy, launched a military operation against the Awami League and helped break the state into two.

If the military had just sat and waited outside the cave in which Mr Bugti was hiding, a cave that was well known and to which newspersons had also trekked, it would have been able to wear out the 80-year-old infirm leader and his companions and forced them out of their hideout. But, no, we had said that if the recalcitrant Baloch leader didn’t mend his ways, he wouldn’t know what had hit him, and we had to prove this.

The state’s authority is challenged more blatantly and in ways that affect our daily lives far more grievously by the pathetic absence of law and order, the increase in street crime, the continued suppression of women in the feudal hinterland, by the way citizens are left to themselves to deal with rain havoc and floods and by those who run private jails than by the actions of one stubborn politician in remote Balochistan. Yet the government that claims to represent us and the state refuses to budge.

Inevitably, therefore, the disconnect between the people and the state has increased. We are all supposed to be responsible citizens who should care about the sanctity of the state, but the government has made the state withdraw from almost all its responsibilities to us. The state doesn’t care for us, and we hardly feel linked to it.

Writing in Dawn’s South Asian Century at the beginning of the millennium, Dr David Page, the commentator and writer on South Asian affairs, had said: “We now have a state where the well off pay for their own water and electricity supplies, use mobile phones and hire their own security forces, while growing social and economic disparities turn subcontinental cities into battle grounds between the well-to-do and the gun-toting dispossessed. The challenge for the new millennium will be to make the state effective enough to arrest that trend and responsible enough to offer hope to all its citizens.”

Well, the state appears to be making itself effective enough, but in ways that seem to increase our sense of alienation and frustration while leaving all the basic problems untouched.

THE dispute resolution methods adopted by the government in Balochistan are producing no results. They are neither resolving the current dispute nor making a future settlement any easier. Although the dispute has acquired violent dimensions, the fact remains that the clash that led to the death of Nawab Akbar Bugti and others is all about the sharing of economic resources.

The way this former parliamentarian, governor and chief minister of Balochistan, who voted for the establishment of Pakistan in 1947, met his end has been criticised by people from all over the country. A legend in his lifetime, he has now become an iconic part of Baloch folklore that even his critics cannot ignore. This writer knew him and was also involved in long discussions and negotiations with him on federal-provincial relations. He had a very sharp mind and could argue his point of view better than most. He was also stubborn and unforgiving and had definite views about how political affairs should be conducted.

Mr Bugti’s death has reopened old wounds. Many had hoped that after suffering more than most countries, the nation, after 59 years, would have finally learned the right lessons. The scars it carries from the time of the political disputes involving Shaikh Mujibur Rahman and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto still haunt the politics and polity of Pakistan.

Can it be that we do not know the harm being done to the federation by the use of violence in the settlement of internal disputes? More likely, we know what is going on but believe that we will ride out whatever storms are caused by the singular pursuit of our objectives.

President Musharraf often talks about his philosophy of ‘unity of command’. This is necessary for a security organisation like the armed forces, but it does not sit well with the concept of a federal and democratic Pakistan. Both federalism and democracy require the separation of powers and need consultations and compromise rather than a command system as a means of developing ‘common interests’ that are the real building blocks of a federation.

That there are differences of opinion, even disputes, among provinces or in federal-provincial relations, is natural. That even when one set of disputes is resolved another crops up is not unusual and inherent in the dynamics of development. What is not natural, however, is the absence of an agreed mechanism for dispute resolution where disagreements are dealt with through debate and discussion.

That institutions like Inter-Provincial Coordination (IPC), the Council of Common Interest (CCI) and parliament exist but appear redundant indicates that we believe in imposing our will rather than working together towards finding our common interest through consultative processes. This attitude causes disputes to pile up without being resolved.

Although the country was founded by a very distinguished lawyer, we did not evolve into a republic of laws protecting the principle of equality and equal opportunities for all citizens. Since the days of Justice Munir we have been honing new skills to subjugate the law to Machiavellian necessities.

Although an Islamic republic, we have disregarded the most fundamental characteristic of Islamic governance throughout history — adl or equity and justice for all, specially the poor and weak sections of society. We forget that injustice or crime committed in the name of religion is a crime against religion. And a crime committed in the name of the republic is a crime against the republic.

We often complain that the elaborate structure of state institutions that we so laboriously created have failed in fulfilling their responsibilities. The reasons for our institutional failures also lie in the absence of a social backup system which is the ultimate guarantee of the institutions of governance performing the functions for which they were created.

That backup power comes from the software of our own personal and social values. It is our principles of conscience that guide our behaviour towards fellow human beings and citizens — whether we treat them with equity, empathy and compassion or not. Lip service apart, if we had actually believed in these values, our institutions would not have been the hollow shells they are and our laws would have been enforced and more respected.

The fact of the matter is that movements for reformation did not strike deep roots in several Muslim countries before they became sovereign independent states. And the kind of governance most of them adopted left no scope for social reforms to be pursued or protected through the structures of governance. That software needed for our social conscience to evolve is still missing from the mode of governance in several Muslim countries.

Although no state machinery can create and inculcate such a value system, democratic accountability is better placed to bridge the gap between expectations and performance of institutions and help develop social conscience in them. Their absence is compounding the problems of the federation.

The scepticism displayed by sections of the Baloch population with regard to the benefits of new mega projects should also be understood in this context. Their own experience of the biggest mega project of the province, Sui gas, is quoted as the basis of their concern. It has been a source of wealth and comfort for the rest of the country for over 50 years — except for the area where it is located and which is the fountainhead of all this energy and wealth. That is why it is also important for us to realise that the economics of the republic cannot be put right if its politics is wrong.

Underdevelopment of any people is more a measure of the quality of political governance than the quantity of economic resources. Governments have a habit of hiding unpleasant facts about poverty and injustice and often use spin doctors to confuse and deflect discussions. Yet, it is important to air the facts of underdevelopment so that people in other provinces and regions are made aware of what is happening to their fellow citizens at the hands of their governments.

It is only in an environment of informed knowledge that people can reach out across their narrow ethnic, sectarian and provincial boundaries and support fair and judicious treatment for their fellow citizens in every region and province of Pakistan. The strong voices being raised in solidarity with the people of Balochistan from other provinces, specially Punjab, have contributed significantly towards improving the health of the federation.

The exercise for getting the politics of development right must begin by implementing the recommendations of the parliamentary committee on Balochistan and quickly move on to defusing other simmering issues. This would help defuse not only the Balochistan situation but also the discontent generated by growing disparities among other sections of society. Already the Sindh government is finding it difficult to hide the findings of a recent World Bank report titled ‘Securing Sindh’s future: challenges ahead’. It paints a very dismal picture of governance in the province.

Islamabad must also rid itself of its known proclivity for installing puppet governments in the provinces. The cost-benefit of this proxy governance is negative since all blame for their incompetence and corruption and the underdevelopment of the people is laid squarely at the doors of Islamabad.

An honest dialogue among the genuine representatives of the people of Pakistan should help redress the situation, create a more inclusive framework for development, and put pressure on the existing institutions of the republic to take up dialogue and dispute resolution for a better future.

We must become a republic of conscience in order to fulfil the promise of a republic of law, reflect justice and equity in governance and realise our full potential as a federal and democratic state.

Email: smshah@alum.mit.edu