INDEPENDENCE Day was celebrated with much enthusiasm on August 14. Let us think aloud what exactly it was that we celebrated. Independence can be taken to mean a man’s freedom to order his affairs as he deems fit, and no external agency may force him to do its will.Independence thus understood can be had only in a utopia, that is, an imagined, anarchist state of affairs. That state is foreign to known human experience. Going from the individual to collectivities, the thought that a people should not be ruled by foreigners surfaced in our region as notions of nationhood and nationalism came into vogue.

The foreign ruler had to be driven out because he was oppressive and exploitive. The assumption in this reasoning being that oppression and exploitation would cease after independence had arrived. The native rulers would work diligently and honestly to improve the people’s lot.

This did not happen in Pakistan. The elites who replaced the British did not believe that independence required any change in their outlook or modus operandi. Civil servants continued to think that revenue collection and the maintenance of law and order were their primary concerns. They may have professed to be servants of the people but actually they went on thinking themselves as rulers.

As years passed, they became more arrogant, more covetous, and less competent than they had ever been under British rule. The state of public order worsened and crime increased.

The people could not reverse these trends because they were not organised to take collective action. Politicians in legislatures and parties who normally speak for the people had still to learn the art of associating and working together. They had heard but not internalised the precept that the core of their professional function was to advance the public interest, which must override their personal or parochial interests. Their politics remained largely personalised and dynastic.

Before independence the great majority of the middle and higher level public officials were not known to take graft. Native politicians had little opportunity to enrich themselves by misuse of their official status. Their vision of the public interest may have been limited but, such as it was, it did for the most part direct their action. Legislative proceedings were orderly and focused.

In post-Independence Pakistan ruling politicians, possibly even more than the bureaucrats, have been plundering the treasury and the nation’s resources. One may ask if native plunderers are to be preferred to the foreign. In my book a thief is a thief regardless of his colour of skin, mother tongue and place of origin.

Why this progressive deterioration in the public domain? I think it is owed primarily to the inefficacy of Pakistani politics. In addition to the limitations mentioned above, it is caught up in the tormenting controversy over the rationale of this country’s creation and continued existence.

Few if any seem to have the sense or the guts to say that this is a sterile debate, that it would be best to proceed from the fact that Pakistan does exist, and that its mission must be to make its people happy and enable them to realise the potential for material, intellectual and moral advancement with which God has endowed each one of them.The foregoing is not to say that the last 60 years have been barren. The economy has undoubtedly grown. While a substantial part of the population is downright poor, the middle, upper-middle, and upper classes seem to have a lot more money than they ever did before. Stores are full of shoppers, restaurants are crowded, privately owned automobiles abound (to the point of creating horrendous traffic jams). Dams, motorways, and beautiful airports have been built. Scores of new universities and colleges have come up.

But, on the other hand, far too many people in the country do not have safe drinking water, enough of nutritious food, adequate healthcare, and access to public education. They have not received the blessings of liberty they had been promised. But I think time is coming when they will not take their privations silently. It is said that successive governments have neglected to provide the needed services and amenities to the people because they have had to allocate a very large proportion of the available resources to national defence. There is now reason to reconsider that level of military spending. The external threat to national security came from India, but this threat has substantially abated following the “peace process” that began four years ago.True that none of the disputes between the two countries has been settled, but that fact is not regarded as a reason to stop the talk, and perhaps even the pursuit, of peace and amity. Regardless of the pace of progress on this front, war between Pakistan and India can be ruled out, because a “balance of terror” exists between then in that each side is armed with nuclear weapons.

Domineering towards their own people, the ruling elites in Pakistan have never known what to do with independence in the context of international politics. They looked for a patron and found one in the United States as far back as 1954. They have happily retained a client’s role since then, except for short periods when the patron did not need their services.They have been willing, whenever the opportunity came their way, to work in aid of American foreign policy objectives in return for money (under the rubric of economic and military assistance). This patron-client relationship has recently placed the present government of Pakistan in an incredibly difficult situation: upon the Bush administration’s bidding, it is waging a war to which the majority of its own people seem to be opposed.Let us now visit the “common man” and ask what independence means to him besides expectation of easier access to the basic amenities of life. During British rule he did not have a say in the formation of public policy that regulated his affairs. The prospect of independence promised him political participation and self-governance. Those who led the struggle for independence assured him that in the dispensation to come he would be governed by his consent given through representatives whom he and his fellow citizens had chosen in free and fair elections.

The Quaid-i-Azam gave the same assurance to the people who were going to be the citizens of Pakistan. But his successors have blatantly ignored and persistently violated this undertaking. It may then be fair to say that in this crucial respect (government founded upon the consent of the governed) the people of Pakistan have not yet seen independence.Independence in this respect will come when democracy comes. Will that happen in the foreseeable future? The signals we get are mixed. General Musharraf and presumably his corps commanders want to keep the status quo (military’s dominance in governance).The ruling party (PML-Q) and its allies are willing to go along with the general’s design. Ms Benazir Bhutto and her PPP are desperately anxious to join this club, but at the end of the day it may transpire that they have in effect been excluded. The remaining opposition parties do not have the capacity to thwart the pro-Musharraf forces.On the other hand, the majority of the people want military rule to end and make way for democracy. Organs of civil society, more notably the lawyers and the media, want the same and may wage some sort of a struggle to get it. Again, the courts may find that the Constitution will not sustain the general’s agenda.

This is a critical year in the country’s history, and we will likely know where we are headed before it runs out.

The writer is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, US.

Email: anwarsyed@cox.net

THE National Assembly will be completing its five-year term on November 16. Under Article 224 of the Constitution, elections to it must be held within 60 days after that i.e. before January 20. With a little over three months left to that sacrosanct date, two questions keep haunting.The first is will the elections be held on time or will the National Assembly vote to extend its life for one more year following a proclamation of emergency by the president as envisaged in Article 232 of the Constitution. The ruling party chief, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, has been constantly suggesting it and would feel vindicated if it were to happen.Exploding bombs, impending court rulings and the lawyers’ threatened campaign timed to coincide with Nawaz Sharif’s return from exile all point towards a situation grave enough for emergency to be declared. What might follow is a different matter and hard to predict.The second, and more troubling, question is whether the elections, whenever held, would be free from official interference. They hardly have ever been but the doubts that the next would not be are more widespread. The confrontation of persons and institutions at the top, a weak election commission and a weaker law and order administration are some of the reasons for this pessimism. A reason less obvious but compelling nevertheless is the presence of thousands of nazims and councillors that dot the landscape from the village hamlets to the capital cities.

Realising the powers the nazims wield and the development funds they control, Benazir Bhutto, while negotiating a power-sharing arrangement with the president’s emissaries, has justifiably demanded the dissolution of the district, taluka and town governments and removal of their nazims before the elections.

The president’s spokesman, Mohammad Ali Durrani, however, insists that the nazims will stay in office as they represent an important institution of the state. He seems to suggest that ministers and MNAs, who would cease to exist, don’t.The nazims need to be removed for the very reason that Mr Durrani has advanced for not removing them. The manpower and the devices that can be used, and have been used in the past, to bully or bribe the voters and tamper with the ballot are all now controlled not by neutral officials but by partisan nazims and more particularly by the district nazim.Under the Constitution, on the dissolution of the assemblies the prime minister and the chief ministers and their cabinets cease to hold office to prevent them from using their official position and resources to influence the polls. The Legal Framework Order of 2002 has added a proviso to Article 224 of the Constitution that binds the president and the governors to appoint caretaker cabinets so that they too do not control the polling process all by themselves.The district governments constitute the third tier of the federation’s executive authority. The local government legislation requires the district nazim to perform all functions relating to law and order in his district. The head of the district police is also answerable to him alone.

The executive officers of the district are all under his direct control and report to him. The district coordination officer, as his designation suggests, has no executive authority nor any specified functions. Because of the wide range of the nazim’s powers and his vast establishment combined with the funds that flow to him from the centre and the province, his capacity to influence the election campaign and outcome of the polls is enormous and much more than the other functionaries of the state — elected or nominated — even at the higher echelons.Musharraf’s devolution plan was based on the fundamental premise that the district nazim would be neutral and non-political. With most powers of the provincial government delegated to the districts that were further protected by a constitutional amendment, Musharraf’s expectation was that a new cadre of public representatives would emerge.The nazims, he further hoped, would look up to him for support and not to the provincial governments or political parties and would do as he directed. In practice, the opposite has happened. The nazims may feel indebted to him but remain firmly in their own political camps.

Take just one example: the nazim of Gujrat is the son of Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain and the nazim of the neighbouring district of Mandi Bahauddin is his brother-in-law. To expect them to stay out of the election affray would be unrealistic. The same can be said for every other district and its nazim. Political affiliations apart, all nazims, with a few exceptions, are connected with the landed gentry or with one or the other business group.

Power for the peasants and workers remains a myth. If at all, the stranglehold on politics of the same old families and clans now also extends to the grassroots.So pervasive and protected are these bonds that even President Musharraf was compelled to admit the other day in a television talk show that while he and his government would not interfere with free electioneering and voting, he could hardly assure that it would not happen far afield. Herein lies an alibi for rigging through the nazims and councillors. But in the evolving situation it can equally work against him.Musharraf should not let the talks with Benazir Bhutto fail only to keep the nazims in office. If there is a case for neutral caretaker governments in the provinces the case is stronger for the districts. Benazir’s low-key deal might result in a fair ballot. Nawaz Sharif’s high-stake manoeuvres are more likely to end up in an emergency than in democracy.

IN THE end everyone returns to their origins, quite often with renewed intensity. Mian Muhammad Nawaz Sharif may still be some distance away from arriving back in an expectant Lahore to reclaim his position in the politics of this cliché-ridden country of ours. He is being touted as a safer option. Before he had to depart for Jeddah some years ago Mian Sahib was held up as an example in the argument for a bar on the strictly home-grown, 50 plus years in age taking part in politics. By the time Pakistanis reached this age threshold, they begin focusing on the life hereafter and their interest in worldly affairs begins to wane, it was argued. They were seen as being prone to executing their fathers’ old-world schemes designed to reinvigorate the dying order of piety. Mian Sahib’s idea of a holy system dressed in the garb of sharia was seen as vindicating that belief. Now that he has been exposed to the West in the interim, can he be trusted not to pick up the threads from where he had left off? Will he or will he not pursue the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution for the enforcement of sharia in the country? The crucial question remains unasked amid reports that he has his baggage packed to return to where he feels he belongs. Ideologies take a back seat as the cult war heats up.

In Punjab many feel Mian Nawaz Sharif has been rehabilitated in national politics. A quarter of a century ago, he was a happy alternate for the God-fearing lot, who were not too comfortable with the more ‘advanced’ first choice, Benazir Bhutto and her Pakistan People’s Party. This is how the choices are emerging again. It is not difficult to see through Mian Nawaz Sharif’s gameplan. While Ms Bhutto is assiduously trying to reach a compromise with the current incumbent, for the time being at least, Mian Sahib has to concentrate on removing the man he has a personal conflict with. The people, their interest and democracy remain out of the equation which as always is heavily tilted in favour of the kingmakers. Presumably, Mian Sahib believes that he can win acceptance in the decision-making cadres once he is able to remove his adversary from the top job. He cannot be faulted for working under the assumption that the affront he caused to the army generally on the evening of October 12, 1999, has been forgotten amid the setbacks General Musharraf’s government has suffered in recent months.Besides, he appears to be offering a choice to those in the establishment who can never bring themselves to favour a Musharraf-Benazir deal. In some Pakistani conference rooms, there is no bigger uniting factor than the Bhutto surname.

Comparisons are hard to avoid given certain coincidences such as the number 10 refrain. Back in 1986, Ms Bhutto chose to return to the country on the 10th day of the month of April. Now Mian Sahib, after much democratic deliberation by his party men in Islamabad and London, has opted for the 10th day of September for his return. And not so much he but his supporters have been promising to gather 10 lakh (one million) people for his reception. There are no marks for guessing. The reference is obviously to the “10 lakh people” who braved Ziaul Haq’s government to greet Ms Bhutto in Lahore in April 1986.Mian Sahib and his party may not need the headcount to drive the message home. Time was when the numbers mattered before the television channel came to magnify all that pleases and scares us. The images may lack the romance of the written word and the people may some time be put off by the one-dimensionality of the coverage that discourages varied interpretations of an event. Impact-wise, there is no denying though that a few hundred people can achieve now where earlier it took a million. If Mian Sahib has been keeping an eye on developments back home during his stay abroad, he should realise that it is not about how many buses his party men are able to charter for his welcome. Channels, even those which at the moment may be favouring Gen Musharraf in his bid to forestall the Sharif homecoming, are audience-bound to ensure it a good coverage. It is about whether or not the chief guest is able to attend.