LEGISLATURES in Pakistan have often to be adjourned for want of quorum. A commentator in this newspaper (February 11, 2007) finds two main reasons for their members’ absenteeism: (1) governments tend to make high policy without consulting the legislature, thus undermining its place and role in the country’s system of governance; (2) assemblies have been dismissed so frequently (five times from 1988 to 1999) as to have given them a feeling of uncertainty about their mission and their future. This explanation may be valid, but I think there is more to this matter.

The opposition had recently requisitioned a special session of the Senate to debate, among other things, the law and order situation in the country. It was prorogued on February 12 amid chaos. Opposition members refused to listen to a minister whom the chairman had invited to wind up the debate. Apart from this event, members screamed at one another, and abusive words were exchanged between a senator from the treasury and a woman senator from the opposition. The National Assembly witnessed the same kind of uproar on the same day and adjourned without taking care of the day’s business. All of this happened in spite of the fact that members of these “august” houses do not tire of demanding restoration of “real” democracy, stressing the sanctity of the Constitution, and proclaiming the supremacy of parliament.

It is customary in our political discourse to call for the strengthening of institutions. But in our actual practice it is also customary, among those who have power, to ignore or abuse, and thus weaken, them.

Institutions function as a preferred alternative to personal and possibly arbitrary decision making. An institution comes into being when two or more persons join together to pursue a shared objective and agree on the procedures they will follow. Adoption of procedures is a distinguishing characteristic of institutions. Without them the persons concerned may be seen as a group, a crowd, or a gang but not as an institution.

The problem with our legislators is that they do not want to be bound by procedures and restrain their disposition to arbitrariness. They want to be free to digress from the subject at hand and deliver irrelevant speeches. They get annoyed with the presiding officer if he disallows their adjournment motions because they are out of order. In sum, they regard parliament not as an institution, which has rules they must follow, but as a place where they are paid to gather. These attitudes of our parliamentarians are also at work in the recently established union councils.

Systems are not difficult to devise. Their structures and procedures are set forth in textbooks. In Pakistan the powers that be have lifted and placed them in a law that calls for “devolution” of governmental authority to the local level. Local bodies used to be in the provincial government’s domain. They have now come under the federal government’s direction, making for more centralisation than devolution.

In their actual practice, union councils are not quite following the law. An old friend of mine, Dr Muneer Ahmad, has studied several of them in a rural area adjoining Lahore. He has found that they do not meet as often as required, some of the women’s seats have remained vacant, in other instances male relatives attend council meetings instead of the elected women, and nobody objects. Committees required by law (“musalihat”, monitoring, citizen community boards, among others) have not functioned. The “nazims,” public officials, and the traditional local notables do not want unsettling changes in the status quo. They do not believe the new local institutions are needed, and they have little interest in making them work.

Looking beyond representative bodies, we see that law-enforcing agencies and the bureaucracy have likewise declined as institutions. There was a time, during British rule, when higher civil servants, committed to the rule of law and invested with plenitude of power, were able to ward off politicians wishing to circumvent it. Within a few years after independence, the civil servant’s deference to the law began to falter. He as well as the politician concluded that rules caused anguish.

When politicians became ministers, they found they could penalise unobliging civil servants. The latter soon learned to do the politician’s will even if it required them to bend the law. They agreed to seize and detain without cause, and even torture opponents of the ruling politicians. Worse than that, they agreed to rig elections. Having agreed to break the law for the benefit of their political superiors, they felt free to break it for their own advantage. And, thus, the regime of law in the workings of the Pakistani bureaucracy collapsed.

Let us now enter another domain, that of the university, presumably given to a life of the mind, professedly engaged in advancing the frontiers of knowledge, and disdainful of material gain. With varying degrees of success, these institutions tried to answer this ideal description. Like most of our other institutions, they suffered decline after independence, but during the last 30 years or so they would appear to have discarded the pursuit of excellence even as a goal. They have settled for mediocrity or worse.

There are good and bad students in any school or college. But one has to see to believe how very awful and distressing bad can be. I cannot forget an instance that I encountered some 30 years ago. I happened to be in Lahore at the time. Without my prior consent, the federal public service commission sent me a bunch of scripts in a political theory examination to evaluate. The examinees were asked to say how Aristotle had assessed the relative merits of various claims to power in the state. Focusing on the word, “relative,” one of them informed me that when Plato died Aristotle occupied his academy in Athens without lawful authority, whereupon Plato’s relatives filed a suit against him in the International Court of Justice at The Hague, which issued a decree in their favour!

I receive a fair number of e-mail messages in response to my articles in this newspaper. The sentence structure, diction, and style in some of them (written in certain cases by high school and college students) are splendid. But the writing in others is absolutely horrid. One of these was recently sent to me by a high-ranking public official, a fact that made me very sad (more so because he had applauded my writing).

We have all heard of the “ghost” schools in Punjab and elsewhere. We are not far from having “ghost” colleges as well. I find that governments in Pakistan, anxious to extend coverage and also to sound good at domestic and international forums, have chosen to prefer numbers to substantive merit. Scores of new colleges and universities have surfaced in the public sector without any regard whatever to the availability of competent teachers.

At one time the University of the Punjab maintained about 25 teaching departments. I hear that now its vice-chancellor, a retired general, boasts that this number has risen to more than 75. This is not unlike the practice in the central government of Pakistan where ministries have been chopped up into more than 70 “divisions” to make room for legislators who want to be given ministerial jobs in return for their support.

A possibly unintended consequence of the government’s stress on numbers should be noted. It has monetised and degraded the enterprise of higher learning. Let us look at a political science department in a local university. There was a time when seven of its 10 faculty members had doctoral degrees from American and British universities. It still has the same number of teachers but only one of them has the terminal degree, and that from one of the newer non-descript universities in Islamabad, in a subject that has little to do with the study of politics.

Now consider the entrepreneurial spirit and initiative of this department: it has set up two sub-departments, one for international relations and the other for strategic studies. The same 10 young people who teach courses in the parent department teach in the international relations and strategic studies programmes. And they get not one but three salaries at the same time. Each one of them is teaching 20 or more hours a week. That would be in addition to the time taken for grading exams and attending meetings.

In 40 years of teaching I never taught more than six hours a week. Colleagues who carried the same load and I were expected to, and did, produce a fair amount of scholarly writing and publications. I see that it is normal for college teachers in Pakistan to carry a teaching load of 15 or more hours a week. Many of them also offer private lessons to students who pay them substantial compensation. That being the case, I don’t see how they can engage in research and produce scholarly publications. Claims of large output in this area coming from various universities may be bogus.

The adverse impact of high teaching loads on a teacher’s scholarship is surely deserving of serious consideration at the Higher Education Commission. The commission should also reconsider its current emphasis on numbers and monetisation. It has been asking universities to turn out more holders of doctoral degrees in spite of an acute shortage of professors capable of guiding and supervising advanced research. Those who manage to get a Ph.D. become entitled to a boost in salary. As a result of this policy, undeserving candidates who have turned in shoddy work are now pretending to excellence in their respective disciplines.

Can it be said that the disposition to emphasise numbers instead of quality, create appearances without caring for the reality which they are supposed to represent, are embedded in our culture? If they are, can our institutions be made to work the way they are supposed to? I am cautiously optimistic. I take comfort from the knowledge that cultures do change in response to the challenges of new circumstances and as a result of interaction with other cultures.

The writer is a visiting professor at the Lahore School of Economics for the spring semester.

E-mail: anwarhs@lahoreschool.edu.pk

BY confirming through a personal and categorical announcement that the present parliament and provincial assemblies would elect him president for the next five-year term, General Musharraf has set the stage for a series of momentous events. Most crucial of all would be his own decision to keep or leave the army command before putting himself up as a candidate for the presidency.

Musharraf’s election, even if he were to choose to remain the chief of army staff, may be a foregone conclusion, but the credibility of the general elections that follow would vastly improve if he were to be elected president as a leader of the public and not as a general of the army. Then, the political parties who have been threatening to boycott the elections may also change their mind and participate.

It is safe to assume that the president and his winning party, would find it difficult, if not outright impossible, to govern the country peacefully if Nawaz Sharif’s Muslim League, the Jamaat-i-Islami and the nationalist parties of Sindh and Balochistan were to stick to their resolve of changing the present order by taking to the streets rather than going to the polls.

If the PPP too joins them (its willingness to attend the multiparty conference convened by Nawaz Sharif suggests it might), the elections would be wholly one-sided and little better than nomination. To govern the country following such an election, Musharraf wouldl have to rely more on the army than on parliament.

Having secured a term for himself ahead of the general elections, President Musharraf should, on the assurance of he himself remaining impartial, persuade all political forces as well as the intelligentsia and the urban middle class to participate in the electoral process. His appearance on the national scene as a leader of the public rather than as a general of the army would break the growing apathy of the masses. His being a general did not inspire the people to vote for or against him in the referendum nor would they go to the polls if they know that he would continue to head the government in the same capacity.

Gen Musharraf has dominated national politics, the administration, defence, foreign affairs and all for the past eight years and will continue to do so far another year leading up to the election campaign and polls. If the politicians who have been the tools as well as the beneficiaries of his rule cannot stand up to those politicians who have been in the doghouse for all these years they certainly would not be able to sustain Musharraf in office if he were to bring them into the assemblies by casting their rivals out of the contest. They should prove their rhetoric of having captured the PPP and PML(N) vote bank by competing in the polls.

A point that cannot be emphasised enough is that the assemblies coming into being through an electoral process from which the acknowledged political leaders are excluded, even if the ballot is not rigged, would not be truly representative of public opinion.

The governments formed at the centre and in the provinces to enforce their writ, therefore, would have to rely heavily on other sources which could be the military, the bureaucracy, the clergy or all three.

It may still be called a parliamentary democracy but the parliament will not be the base of its power as it has not been up until now.

In the next elections the common man will judge the present parliament not by its legislative or economic record but by the manner in which the legislators and the ministers conduct themselves.

Larger in numbers and more extravagant than in any previous regime, they have burdened the exchequer without being of help to the people or of use to the government. The electorate need to be given a wider choice. The opposition should not deny this choice to the voters by its boycott nor should the government by disqualifications or, worse still, through rigging.

In pursuing its national aims in the last five years, Pakistan has been a hostage to regional and world forces at a scale unknown in the past. Nevertheless, Musharraf may find large popular support for his policies in seeking a negotiated solution to the Kashmir dispute and in stemming the rising tide of fanaticism.

The solution of Kashmir is nowhere yet in sight and Musharraf has been seen retreating a bit too often before the clerics and of late before the shrouded armed madressah women but the direction of his policies on Kashmir and against extremism is widely acclaimed.

The point to emphasise is that in carving out a place for himself in national politics Musharraf should now rely on his own performance rather than on the army and even less on the politicians surrounding him.

Musharraf’s election by the present assemblies, howsoever loathsome it might be, would be vindicated if he were not to support any party or individual nor bar any from campaigning and voting.

If the leaders returning from exile to lead their parties are to be sent back or into prison, as Sheikh Rashid recently said they would be, the prospects of a stable government emerging out of the elections will remain bleak even if the ballot is not rigged.