DISCOURSING on his “Vision for Pakistan” a couple of weeks ago (October 16, 2006), Mr Shaukat Aziz cautioned his listeners that even though disagreement and debate were essential elements in democracy, internal dissensions made the country vulnerable to external threats. He then went on to call for a broad consensus on fundamental issues. He did not identify them, but identified they must be if they are to be resolved.

Addressing a conclave of his supporters on October 27, General Pervez Musharraf named issues that he said were of the “utmost importance” and must therefore be addressed. They were: strengthening of the federation, and improvement in the state of law and order. The implication being that the federation was in a poor state, and that so was public order. Interestingly enough, this is what his critics say also, but they attribute these failings to his style of rule and policies.

The government’s legitimacy has been a troublesome issue in Pakistan since the dismissal of Prime Minister Nazimuddin in 1953, and more particularly since General Ayub Khan’s coup in October 1958. It has plagued the country’s politics even during the subsequent parliamentary regimes. It was alleged that those who took power had actually seized it by rigging elections. The present government denies that the elections in October 2002 were rigged and insists that its legitimacy is not in doubt, but politicians outside the ruling coalition and the generality of political observers do not accept these claims.

We have no personal knowledge of what exactly was said at the general’s meeting with his supporters referred to above. Reports leaked out to newsmen have it that he made two other, rather intriguing, observations. He said he wanted to ensure that the next elections would be honest and “transparent.” Next, he said that people in the troubled areas of Balochistan and the NWFP must be “taken into confidence” and this was to be done by bringing them into the “political mainstream.”

I cannot say what exactly he had in mind (assuming that he himself knew). He may have meant that administrative and judicial organs and agencies, representative bodies and political parties, functioning in the settled areas should be established in the tribal regions also. That is surely a worthy objective but it is one that, given firm determination, will take quite a few years to implement.

General Musharraf’s opponents have been saying all along that the next elections will not be fair if he is in office when they are held, and that he must therefore be made to go. I believe the opposition’s design in this regard is not likely to work. I expect he will be at the helm when elections are held. Those who want fair elections must plan their moves accordingly. They will do well to shift their focus from removing him to limiting his and his government’s ability to influence electoral outcomes.

Does the general really want the elections to be fair? Politicians and government spokesmen do not always reveal their real intentions. Considering that the observation in question was made at a private meeting, one may argue that he may well have meant what he said. If so, that is reason for all of us to be happy. But it is not reason enough to lower our guard. We still must do all we can to prevent, or at least minimise, electoral rigging. What can be done?

A caretaker government will be in place during the required number of days preceding the election. None of the four such governments installed between 1988 and 1996 delivered an entirely honest election. Consisting of persons who are in office only for a couple of months, it will not get respectful hearing from politicians or public officials, who know that it is here today and will be gone tomorrow.

A certain amount of electoral malpractice is done by the candidates themselves, especially the large landowners in rural areas, who will use their local influence to coerce, bribe, or seduce voters to support them. There is not very much that external forces can do to neutralise them.

Nor is there reason to expect that an “independent” and adequately empowered Election Commission will produce an entirely honest election.

The Constitution endows the Commission with abundant authority to do its work. But even if each one of its members is impeccably honest and fiercely independent, it cannot ensure a fair and honest election, because it simply does not have the capacity to exercise effectively the authority the Constitution has given it. It is in no position to enforce its directives upon the many thousands of public officials who will be out in the field performing election-related functions.

The next elections will be reasonably fair and honest only if the social forces in the country can set up systems of constraint that will keep the country’s intelligence agencies, police, and various other public servants from partisan intervention in the electoral process.

In a letter to the editor of this newspaper (October 29), Masud Mufti (whose long and distinguished service to the country is well known) has argued that a new political party that is truly democratic both in its internal organisation and its external conduct is the only way of excluding military interventions and ensuring decent governance. This is eminently sensible advice. But upon further reflection Mufti Sahib might want to agree that while his advice holds in the longer-term perspective, it cannot be the prescription for securing fair elections and a legitimate civilian regime in the next few months.

Let us now turn to another one of the general’s professed priorities, which is strengthening the federation. It is likely that he does not understand why the federation is in a bad state. Let us explain to him the fact that the amount of centralisation that has characterised this country’s governmental system is simply inconsistent with the concept and the normal practice of a federation. The federating units in Pakistan, other than Punjab, have been agitating for a larger measure of autonomy since its very inception. Those who hold power have progressively increased central control over all subjects of governance even as they have applauded (for reasons of expediency) the notion of provincial autonomy. They have promised to enlarge the provincial domain many a time but they have never implemented it.

General Musharraf takes pride in the so-called devolution of authority and power to local governments that his advisers devised. But it is in fact designed to extend central direction all the way down to the village level and emasculate the provincial governments. The centralising impulse is the main culprit here, the principal threat to the federation’s integrity. The general and his successors in power have to make a choice: do they want an overbearing centre or a thriving federation? They can’t have both. In an ethnically and culturally diverse society a unitary state will not do even if its Constitution calls it a federation.

Another item on the general’s list of troublesome issues is that of law and order. This has customarily been regarded as a provincial subject. All of the four chief ministers have periodically claimed that the state of law and order in their respective provinces is fine. But evidently General Musharraf has now come to share the much more general perception that life in Pakistan has become hazardous. We hear it said everywhere that the ordinary citizen’s life and limb, property, and honour are now threatened more than ever before.

We are witnessing law-breaking at more than one level. Some of it is politically and/or ideologically motivated. Those who are placing bombs to explode in crowded places, taking out power and gas transmission system and railway tracks, and disrupting other public utilities, are not ordinary criminals. Some of them are extremists who believe that all persuasions other than their own deserve to be subdued or, better still, eliminated.

Then there are people whose long-standing sense of deprivation, subjection to exploitation, and other grievances the power elite in this country have not addressed. As these people see it, they have been waiting for redress for more than half a century, but in vain. They have lost patience and now chosen to revolt against the current political system and those who operate it,

These troubles being political, the answer to them must also be political. It is not enough for General Musharraf to disown extremism and preach moderation and enlightenment to the people at large. He has to practise moderation in his own attitude towards his adversaries. He must also place Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain and the likes of him within PML-Q on the front seats in his enlightenment train. They are the kind that would rather forget about the protection of women’s rights bill; they are the ones who are always ready and willing to use religion as an instrument for advancing their own interests; they will pass a law that requires the state to enforce the Shariat even though they have no intention of doing it.

The government of Pakistan must make up its mind where it stands vis-a-vis the Islamic and other ideologically militant parties in the country. It must recognise that it cannot have their support unless it makes concessions to their obscurant world view and programme. It cannot be ambivalent on this score and still be a convincing preacher of moderation and enlightenment.

I cannot say why ordinary crime (theft, robbery, graft, embezzlement, extortion, kidnapping, rape, assault, and murder) has been proliferating in recent years. We should invite a criminologist to explain it. But there is one aspect of this problem which is easily understood. There is the fact, among others, that the disposition to ignore or break the law has a way of filtering down from above. If heads of government, ministers, ranking politicians, legislators, and higher civil servants — all of them supposedly guardians of the law — feel free to act outside the law, we can be sure that many others, including tax collectors and policemen, will do the same.

The writer is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, US. E-mail: anwarsyed@cox.net

ON the retirement or death of a civil servant a thought inevitably arises whether the system now in vogue can provide men to fill the void they leave behind in public service. Never has this thought arisen more intensely than on the death of Ghulam Ishaq Khan who dominated Pakistan’s bureaucratic scene longer than any other individual.

A day after hid death, Muzafar Husain passed away. He occupied a special position in the annals of bureaucracy for he was the last chief secretary of East Pakistan. A better known civil servant-turned-diplomat, (and more productive after retirement) Agha Shahi passed away a few weeks earlier. Many others held their jobs, some with equal or greater competence, but in a way these two will be uniquely remembered.

Ghulam Ishaq Khan was, so to say, a lateral entrant in the ranks of the Civil Service of Pakistan (CSP) who in the course of time streaked ahead of them all to wind up his career as secretary general-in-chief, a position that Ziaul Haq created to set him above the rest of the lot. His spectacular rise might have inspired jealousy among his peers but only admiration among those who worked with him. He gave to his colleagues more credit than it was due and was equally indulgent where it wasn’t.

Ghulam Ishaq Khan’s political career was far less enviable and is a story apart but his propriety as a civil servant was never called into question. As governor of the State Bank in the early seventies, he submitted to the authority of the junior deputy commissioner 20 years his junior (which this writer then was) when it came to handling the law and order situation created by the protesting bank employees.

It was left to General Musharraf to convince himself in the first flush of his rule that the deputy commissioner was a redundant colonial legacy. Now that trouble swirls all around, no one is sure who is responsible for law and order and whether this responsibility can be at all entrusted to the district nazims as the law now vaguely stipulates. Would the Jamaat-i-Islami, for instance, submit to the directions of Karachi’s MQM nazim in the course of the mass agitation it proposes to launch against the government? No one should have any doubt that it would not.

Ziaul Haq had Ghulam Ishaq Khan, an astute administrator, by his side to advise him, Musharraf has Chaudhry Shujaat, a dyed-in-the-wool politician. The lesson emerging from the two eras is that ideology, party interests and personal prejudices have to be kept out of the law and order administration.

Muzafar Husain was sent to East Pakistan as chief secretary when the writ of the government had ceased to run there and murderous mobs roamed the streets. Along with him went a group of robust officers who, because of their past postings in East Pakistan, were familiar with the Bengali language and culture. This group, among others, comprised S.K. Mahmud, Masud Mufti, Muzaffar Ahmad, S.M. Hassan, Humayun Faiz Rasul, Alamdar Raza, Aslam Iqbal and Hasan Zaheer (he later wrote what is considered a most authentic account of the causes and events leading to the separation of East Pakistan). MAK Chaudhry, a senior police officer, was sent to put together the province’s subverted police force.

Discontent and insurgency by then had gone too far for the civil servants to make much of a difference but they stood steadfast at their posts in the midst of mayhem leading to the surrender. But they all agreed that the horror of the civil war and the dreariness of the Barellie prison that followed were greatly relieved by Muzafar Husain’s caring leadership. He refused to be coerced into attending the surrender ceremony at Dhaka, and later in Barellie, he declined the Indian commander’s offer to shift him from the prison barracks to the officer mess. Hasan Zaheer, who was his prison mate, and Shoaib Sultan Khan, who later worked with him in the ministry of rural development, both testify that in times good or bad one could not expect a boss better than Muzafar Husain.

Before Agha Shahi went on to distinguish himself at the United Nations (as foreign minister Zafrulla Khan’s staff officer) and higher diplomatic assignments, he was deputy commissioner of Thatta in the early years of independence. A quarter of a century later, President Z.A. Bhutto held a public kutchery at Thatta. He asked the peasantry gathered there what could he do for them to return the favour they had done to him by electing him from their district. They asked for Agha Shahi to be sent back to them as deputy commissioner because cattle theft had spread fast since his departure. Shahi, they told Bhutto, would lock up every landlord of the area till the stolen cattle was recovered.

Bhutto asked the then incumbent deputy commissioner Mohammad Zafrullah to be like Shahi. He was the last man in authority to say it and, perhaps, also meant it. Since then everyone speaks for the patrons of the cattle thieves. Then came General Musharraf to declare that deputy commissioner did nothing and abolished the post. Kidnapping people is now more rewarding than cattle rustling was in Shahi’s time.

The governors and chief ministers react to growing crime and disorder by appointing more and more ministers, advisers and special assistants while the responsibility for maintaining law and order now lies with the district nazim and public safety commission. Neither is inclined to accept this responsibility nor qualified or equipped to discharge it.

Considering the growing public sentiment and political expectations, it appears only a matter of time, a very short time indeed, before the provinces gain full autonomy. Left to administer only a few common subjects like foreign affairs, defence, currency and communications, the centre would need talented service cadres in the image of the three departed souls to whom this column is dedicated to keep the federation together. The all-Pakistan services, not in general administration alone but also in the economic, technical and social sectors would ensure that the autonomous provinces follow uniform standards in conducting their business and in implementing national policies.

The current trend, however, runs in the opposite direction. The few all-Pakistan services that were there have been downgraded to the district level where the officials who are expected to be neutral are overwhelmed by party politics and all jobs, new and old, have become bargaining chips on the political chessboard. It seems the idea of a neutral public servant recruited on the basis of merit has been abandoned for all times to come.

Finally, a suggestion. The Constitution should be amended to restrict the number of ministers at the centre and in each province to 10, with five advisers and no special assistant. The government should find some way other than reducing the cabinet to a farce to ensure its majority in the assemblies. After all the cabinet is the fountainhead of governance — good or bad. This suggestion is being made despite the knowledge that the regime lets the critics say what they like to say but keeps doing what it likes to do while the public service sinks deeper into despondency with every passing day.