The Quaid and his party

THREE days ago the 130th birth anniversary of the Quaid-i-Azam was celebrated and the centenary of the founding of the All-India Muslim League is only two days away. Both occasions have been enthusiastically seized by the Establishment for its own political advancement, leaving the people wondering as to what is going to be the new interpretation of the Quaid’s vision and the legacy of his party.

This is nothing new. Except for the Zia period (1977-88), when the Quaid and the Muslim League were relatively neglected by the official managers of the national discourse, the country’s rulers have always claimed to be faithful to the traditions established by the man who founded Pakistan and the party he had built to accomplish the task.

Even the party (PPP) that rose to power after vanquishing not one but three Muslim Leagues pledged faithfulness to the Quaid’s declaration “that Pakistan would be a democratic state based on Islamic principles of social justice” in the Constitution brought forth by it in 1973. No one has however been able to resolve the contradiction between the Quaid’s legacy and the ways of the various pretenders to the All-India Muslim League’s gaddi.

The All-India Muslim League (AIML) which was born in Dhaka in December 1906 expired in Karachi in December 1947, after realising its objective, as pointed out by H.S. Suhrawardy. At its last Council meeting, presided over by the Quaid-i-Azam and when a majority of its delegates belonged to India, two new parties were born — one to lead the people of Pakistan and the other to serve the Muslims of India, though the latter inherited the name and title of the late mother-party.

The AIML had an uneventful childhood, except for its contribution to the Lucknow Pact of 1916, probably the last indigenous effort towards a solution of India’s communal problem, and which, ironically, undermined the party’s position in the two largest Muslim majority provinces (by turning their majorities into minorities in the assemblies). For almost a decade (1919-27) it was superseded by other Muslim political formations, chiefly the Khilafat Committee, and the first half of the 1930s saw it groping in wilderness.

Mohammad Ali Jinnah rescued it in the middle of that decade and set about transforming it from a club into a political party, and he remained at its helm till December 1947. After that he apparently did not intervene in the party affairs. He is reported to have even declined the newly-born Pakistan Muslim League’s 1948 offer to make in his case an exception to its decision to separate party and government offices. As governor-general he had to keep a balance among the different political parties, he is reported to have said.

Thus, the only period relevant for studying the traditions set by the All-India Muslim League as a political outfit, and by the Quaid as a party leader, is 1935-1947. The Muslim Leagues born in Pakistan after 1947 have had scant respect for the AIML traditions and their leaders have been guilty of historical fallacy if and when they have presumed themselves to be the Quaid-i-Azam’s successors. The deviations from the Quaid-AIML legacy made by Pakistan’s post-1948 rulers and heads of Pakistan Muslim Leagues need to be discussed these days for they have contributed a great deal to the nation’s travails over the past 50 years. And more of the same may not be avoidable.

One of the most significant contributions the Quaid made to the Muslim League politics was the ability to drop ideas whose time had passed. All those who argue that he abandoned the Two-nation Theory on August 11, 1947 are on a firm ground. There was no ambiguity in his call to create a Pakistan nation comprising all citizens of the new state regardless of belief or domicile in the course of his opening address to the Constituent Assembly. Anybody seeking to revive this theory in the Muslim majority Pakistan (1947-71) and especially in the almost totally Muslim Pakistan (1971 to date) cannot claim to be true to the Quaid’s legacy. Nor is the support of reason and commonsense available to him.

There was a time when the Quaid defended the system of separate electorates as something the Indian Muslims needed during their transition to democratic politics but he never treated it as an immutable part of any ideology. He was prepared to give up this system in 1928, subject to a broad agreement between the League and the All- India Congress. The huge damage caused to Pakistan by the advocates of separate electorates— and the breed has by no means become extinct — could have been avoided if the PMLs had followed the Quaid’s principle of separating transient tactics from permanent objectives.

That the Quaid invariably followed his own counsel is known but he had no peer on the vast pre-1947 political stage in upholding the principle of collective decision-making. Whenever he was asked to commit the All-India Muslim League to any proposals made by the British government or by Indian leaders opposed to the League, or even by Muslim factions ready to join his party (such as the Ahrar), the answer always was that the decision could only be taken by the appropriate AIML body (Working Committee or the Council).

This even when Mountbatten threatened to deprive him of Pakistan if he delayed his response to a viceregal proposal till the party executive had debated it. The Liaqat-Desai formula was rejected as the party had not approved the idea in advance although few could believe Liaqat Ali had acted on his own. Compare this principle with the record of PMLs that have been hijacking the name and parsimony of their adopted mother.

Most of the prime ministers working under the label of one PML or another have not been chosen by the party and have been foisted from above. Chieftainship of the PML of the season has often been granted ex-officio to government heads. There have been times when the head of this PML or another body bearing the same name did not constitute a working committee that could in any event be consulted.

However, in the Quaid-i-Azam’s view there were some clear limits to his Muslim League’s power to dispose of the community’s affairs. He did not arrogate to himself the authority to draw up Pakistan’s constitution nor did he allow the AIML to entertain such ambition. A constitutional scheme supposedly derived from religion could not be discussed by the League executive. Whenever he was asked about the polity Pakistan of his demand was going to be the answer was the people would decide the matter and nobody else. He would at best declare that Pakistan had to be a democracy and a federation and not a theocracy. Has any one claiming to be defender of the Quaid’s legacy respected or even acknowledged the sovereign right of the people in the area of making or unmaking of the constitution or amending the Basic Law beyond recognition?

Two other traditions set by the Quaid need to be noticed. As AIML president he avoided interfering in matters that lay within the jurisdiction of party institutions. Instances are on record when candidates for provincial/central assemblies he did not like got party tickets and all complaints were referred to the relevant parliamentary boards. When, on the very morrow of independence, Daultana and Mamdot started fighting each other, he did invite them to meet him in Karachi but only advised them to work as a team and avoided imposing any solution on either of them.

As governor-general, Mohammad Ali Jinnah addressed many functions organised by institutions, including defence units, subordinate to him. He never failed to thank the gathering for listening to him and his hosts for the honour done to him. Examples of good mannered treatment of citizens set by the Quaid proved to be of no use to his successors.

Finally, how does one reconcile allegiance to the Quaid and claim of descent from the All-India Muslim League with military rule or despotism of a dubiously elected authority/body? The Quaid made it clear more than once that all legitimate authority was vested in holders of constitutionally sanctioned offices and that the military, for whom he had done much, had no place in politics.

Throughout the ritualistic ceremonies that may be scheduled to honour the Quaid or the party led by him, it may be necessary to remember that time and distance help people properly assess historical figures and institutions both. The Quaid-i-Azam was human and therefore not infallible. The All-India Muslim League was a party of human beings who had to work in an environment that was neither universal nor permanent. They could and did make mistakes. Nothing will be gained by anyone claiming to be absolutely faithful to the Quaid or his party except for a charge of hypocrisy. The battles that lie ahead cannot be won by displaying laurels won in the past. And that too by personalities now part of history.

Wolfowitz owes us an explanation

ACCOUNTABILITY is one of those ideals, like justice or the triumph of right over might, that are wonderful in principle but usually disappointing in practice.

This is nowhere more true than in Washington, where one of the most powerful men in President Bush’s inner circle, a man who helped conceive, plan and execute the Iraq war, has managed to escape scrutiny for steering his country into one of the greatest strategic catastrophes of his generation.

I am referring, although nobody else does, to Paul Wolfowitz. Remember Wolfowitz, best known as the “chief architect of the Iraq war”? Before the war, he was hailed by many as one of the great foreign policy intellectuals of our time. He was a leading defence strategist, a former US ambassador to Indonesia and the former dean of the School of Advanced Studies at Johns Hopkins University, a man whose views on democracy and the Middle East were taken seriously by both his admirers and his critics. In 2001, Wolfowitz, then 58, was named deputy secretary of defence, serving as top aide to then Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

Yet today, as the policies he put in place come crashing down, Wolfowitz is nowhere to be found — at least not at the Pentagon. In fact, he left in 2005 to become president of the World Bank, where he has been busy trying to save Africa.

In seeking refuge at the World Bank, Wolfowitz has followed in the footsteps of Robert McNamara, President Johnson’s Vietnam War-era defence secretary. McNamara was the “architect” of the Vietnam War in his own time, but he bailed out of the Pentagon to run the World Bank in 1968 as the US body count mounted.

What is particularly disturbing is that Wolfowitz is visibly delighting in his role as one of the world’s highest-profile (publicly funded) philanthropists — while saying barely a word about the catastrophe in Iraq. In the few comments he has been badgered into making about the war since he left the Pentagon, he has defended the conduct of the US and expressed the belief that Iraqis will struggle their way to freedom.

He has insisted that the subject of Iraq rarely comes up in his new job, where people would rather hear his plans for Africa. How convenient to be required to read proposals for breaking the poverty cycle instead of the morning casualty reports that blight each daybreak at the Pentagon.

I invited Wolfowitz to comment, telling us his views on Iraq or the problem of democracy in the radicalised Middle East. He declined, but e-mailed this response: “I’m not a US official any more and unfortunately not a private citizen either. I work for 184 countries that expect me to do the job at the World Bank. I would like nothing better than to be able to get involved in this debate [over Iraq]. I would particularly like to be able to clear the record of some of the garbage about myself personally, but if I start doing that, the people I work for would say, ‘You are not doing your job, you are getting mixed up in something that is a distraction from the message that we would like you to deliver.’ I have spoken to heads of 11 African countries, I have spoken to ordinary people, I have spoken to civil society groups; none of them care about my role in Iraq, they care about what I do in the World Bank.”

Is that a reasonable answer? It’s true that the bank’s international board probably would prefer that Wolfowitz stick to saving Africa. But is that an excuse for him to keep silent while his country is agonising over how Iraq went so wrong?

Earlier this month, Wolfowitz was heckled during a speech in Atlanta. One protester called him a war criminal. That’s silly. But it is true that the brilliant and idealistic advisor, in large part through the force of his ideas, played a big part in selling the war to his bosses, and eventually to the American people.

To his credit, Wolfowitz had argued for years that the US policy of cooperating with repressive regimes in the Middle East was a grave mistake, that democracy and freedom were not American values but universal aspirations. His principled opposition to tyranny in any form won him many admirers — as well as the respect of people who disagreed with him on some issues but believed his ideas posed a moral challenge that could not be ignored.

Wolfowitz also believed the US had erred in allowing Saddam Hussein to stay in power after the dictator ravaged Kuwait in 1990. And he continued to advocate for Hussein’s overthrow. Sept. 11 revived his aging arguments.

According to Bob Woodward, when Bush’s senior advisors assembled at Camp David just days after the 9/11 attacks, Wolfowitz was the only one who advocated military action against Iraq as a first response.

In Woodward’s book, Wolfowitz is shown criticizing some aspects of Rumsfeld’s conduct of the war. Yet some of the most fundamental misjudgments of Iraq appear to have been his as well. He testified to Congress, for instance, that US troops were more likely to be treated as liberators than occupiers, and that Iraq’s own wealth would likely suffice to pay for most of its reconstruction.

He dismissed warnings that ethnic strife could erupt in a democratic or chaotic Iraq, saying that most of the violence in Iraq had always been by the Hussein regime against various ethnic groups. And his promotion of the now-discredited Ahmad Chalabi has never been explained.

In February 2003, on the eve of the invasion, before the House Budget Committee, he heaped scorn on “the notion that it will take several hundred thousand US troops to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq,” saying that the number was “wildly off the mark.”

Of course, plenty of other smart people also got Iraq wrong, so why single out Wolfowitz? Because from Bush on down, the politicians are being held accountable. Iraq has destroyed the Bush legacy. Generals have seen their military wounded. The war has tarnished Colin Powell’s once-shining reputation, destroyed Rumsfeld’s and killed any shot Condoleezza Rice might have had at the White House. But Wolfowitz has failed up, into one of the world’s most prestigious jobs. “I’ll have a chance sometime to talk about Iraq,” Wolfowitz said in his e-mail last week. “But it’s a distraction and a harmful distraction from what I’m trying to accomplish for Africa and the developing world.”

Still, as a man whose reputation for intellectual honesty helped land him the World Bank job, the cerebral Wolfowitz owes the American people not only an explanation but also his best forensic analysis of mistakes made and how not to repeat them. Does he believe democracy can be promoted in any real sense when the Middle East is on fire? Under his stewardship, the World Bank is stepping up lending in Iraq, so these questions are not entirely academic.

If Wolfowitz still believes that the decision to go to war was correct and that more reconstruction money can still save Iraq, then this is a critical time to explain why. If he believes he erred, he should help us understand how it happened and why — and he should apologise, as a private citizen. A World Bank job — or any other important post — should not shield him from accountability.—Dawn/Los Angeles Times Service

Interplay of politics & economics

CAN the economics of a country be right if its politics are wrong? Issues of poverty and growing gaps in prosperity among people and regions are causing concern and figure prominently in public debates and the national media. The acceleration of growth certainly adds wealth and income to the economy. But where they trickle down and where they do not is equally important.

There are increasing signs that alongside development we are also witnessing the disempowerment of certain sections of society. Other countries confronted with similar problems have used multi-pronged reforms to reverse these dangerous trends. The question that begs to be answered is: can the problems of an unjust economic order be redressed by the operation of economic forces alone, without addressing the issues of an unjust political order?

The European model of political and economic governance compares favourably with the American and Japanese models, because for quite some time now Europe has been sensitive and painstaking about reforming its politics and economics. However, in the past, there were certain robber-baron states in 19th century Europe whose governments were denounced by Marx because they conducted themselves like “the executive committee of the ruling class”. They blurred the difference between the private and public domains, converted lawmaking into an exercise in self-dealing and used the instruments of governance to advance only the interests of the ruling class.

But a look at several developing countries shows that the old robber-baron state model that Marx complained of is still alive and kicking in several parts of the world as is evident in the case of the OIC countries. But the movement for wide-ranging reforms in politics and economics that defused the barrage of uprisings and attempted revolutions across 19th century Europe is nowhere in sight in these countries. In fact, the bottled up anger of their people is starting to spill — across the borders as well.

Before we move further, let us be clear that politics is understood as the system and mechanics of decision-making that concerns the raising and distribution of resources. In this way, politics refers to decision-making processes about national resources in the countries.

But decision-making does not take place in abstract terms nor is it a question of having good intentions only. Almost always governance is confronted with trade-offs to be made among several competing demands upon finite resources. In countries with long established traditions of equal opportunities and the rule of law, economic, political, legal, financial and cognitive considerations come into play when decisions are made about governance.

In Pakistan there are no traditions of ‘affirmative action’ for the weak and marginalised and legal protection is not extended to equal opportunities for all citizens. These factors combined with a historically weakened rule of law have caused considerations like ethnicity, language and sectarian, territorial and group loyalties to play a significant part in decision-making including that at the highest echelons of governance.

In such models of governance, the prosperity of a section or group of people is directly proportionate to the number of years it has managed to exercise control over the levers of political power. By the same token, the poverty of others is not merely a function of economic logic or the lack of merit which is a creature of opportunities. In people and regions seldom visited by opportunities, the potential is unearthed and unpolished. Using merit in playing fields that are heavily skewed is unfair and sometimes little more than an excuse for further denials of opportunities.

Let us take the words of a very renowned economist. John K. Galbraith, the highly respected Harvard economist, diplomat and president of the American Economic Association, put it straight to a distinguished gathering of economists when he said that, “economics divorced from the consideration of exercise of power is without meaning and certainly without relevance.”

Economic and political power cannot be sanitised and segregated. Therefore, when we address the issue of poverty and disparity without acknowledging the interplay of economic and political forces, we are not being very fair. Sometimes, by concealing this interplay, we are only abetting the diversion of attention from the dire need to reform political governance, and resultantly the economic order in society.

We have noted the small role that rationality and ethics have been playing in our decision-making systems for many years and the larger than life space usurped by non-economic factors in determining what should or should not be done. It is these decisions that determine who the winners or losers in society will be. Obviously, such decisions are marketed in whatever is the politically correct phraseology of the times including Islam and national interest; and history is replete with instances where these as well as other factors have been pressed into service by the ruling classes to perpetuate their narrow interests. Grievances caused by such a mediaeval and irrational style of governance have been accumulating over the years especially where people and regions perceive themselves to be at the wrong end of such self-dealing habits of decision-makers. Even worse, it is the same people who have been disadvantaged over the years in more ways than one — socially, economically and politically. These elements are now identifiable in Balochistan, rural Sindh and southern Punjab.

Decision-making in a predatory political order unaccountable to the people and unanswerable to the ordinary laws of the land is even more likely to be pushing people into poverty and widening disparities.

This does not mean that all is well with our politics which badly needs reforms like the ones that brought Europe back from a spate of uprisings and turned it into a model of political and economic governance. In our politics it must be noted that the reform processes have been frequently checkmated by ubiquitous palace and military coups repeatedly inflicted upon the nation and stunting the political development of society.

It says something about the quality and ethics of governance of a country where not a single government in the nearly 60 years of its history has been voted out of office by its citizens.

So if we want to get down to reducing poverty and disparities we have to address the core issue of interplay between politics and economics and realise that the struggle for a fair economic order must go hand in hand with the struggle for a fair political order. It is not realistic to expect that a just economic order can be delivered by an unjust political order that itself thrives on unequal opportunities.

The writer is a former federal secretary. Email: smshah@alum. mit.edu

From bad to worse

SOMALIA has impinged on the consciousness of sated westerners over Christmas because Ethiopia’s intervention has now added a dangerous new dimension to an already protracted crisis. But the fact is that this desperately poor country in the Horn of Africa has been living with chronic conflict and insecurity for 16 long years. This latest grave escalation owes much to international neglect, errors and disarray.

Ethiopian troops, tacitly backed by the US, had been operating unofficially in Somalia for several months. Addis Ababa has now openly sent its tanks and planes across the border as the beleaguered and largely powerless UN-backed transitional government in Baidoa was facing defeat by the Somali Council of Islamic Courts.

The SCIC has brought a semblance of authority to the swathes of the country it controls, having strengthened its position enormously by capturing Mogadishu in June. As the Taliban once did in Afghanistan, it provides stable government of a sort through rough, ready and uneven application of Sharia law.

The travails of this byword for a failed state go back to 1991 when the socialist regime of Muhammad Siad Barre was overthrown by local warlords. UN intervention to end the ensuing chaos brought US Marines storming photogenically ashore unopposed — only to be withdrawn in attacks immortalised in the film Blackhawk Down. The UN’s departure augured badly for peacekeeping in the post-cold war era. Somalia was written off with a geopolitical shrug and a closing of donors’ chequebooks.

Its return to the headlines in recent months has been heavily coloured by post-9/11 realities. Washington has viewed Somalia’s domestic complexities and their intertwined regional repercussions through the distorting prism of the “war on terror”, playing up evidence of Al Qaeda connections and funding the warlords fighting the SCIC, in breach of a UN embargo.

The Bush administration’s nods and winks to Ethiopia can be compared to its encouragement of Israel’s war against the Lebanese Hezbollah this summer. In the view of the International Crisis Group, it has given a green light for Ethiopia’s policy of “containment by intervention”. And Ethiopia and Somalia are of course historic rivals, as are Ethiopia and Eritrea, which stands credibly accused of funnelling weapons and fighters to the Somali rebels.

Talk by Meles Zenawi’s Christian-led Ethiopian regime of ‘fighting international terror’ dovetails alarmingly with a demonological Islamist world view that is fortified by some hard-core jihadis. Kenya worries about its own Muslim minority. So the stage is set for a wider, partly proxy conflict, in which a fully fledged Somali war joins the daily horrors from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Not for the first time, soldiers have moved more decisively than diplomats, with the African Union and UN talking feebly about sending in peacekeepers even as they struggle with the larger crisis of Darfur. Kofi Annan warned of dire consequences in a valedictory speech before Christmas. UN agencies gloomily predict disaster for efforts to supply food and aid to 1.4m people who are already suffering from the effects of the worst floods in 50 years.

—The Guardian, London