SOME time ago Asma Jahangir of the Human Rights Commission spoke of a link between what she called state agents and militant groups which had made governance disfunctional. Asma may be less strident now but the link has not weakened. Only the people have given up. That reminds me of Justice M. R. Kayani’s speech at the Civil Service Academy half a century ago.

As a young ICS officer he was posted as subdivisional magistrate in a hot and dusty part of Punjab. He was told that there were many duststorms in summer. But in a display of wry humour that was his trademark he said he was lucky. In his tenure there was only one storm. It began in April and lasted till November.

The people had learnt to live with storms. Waking up in the morning, they would just shake the sand off their sheets and get down to their daily chores. The government of Ayub Khan, he went on to say, had promised a green garden but gave the people a black garden. Nawab of Kalabagh, the all-powerful governor of West Pakistan, twirled his handle-bar moustache as he looked up to Justice Kayani. Both had made their point. The audience of young civil service probationers was left roaring in laughter.

That was an authoritarian age but, I must say, the district officers, as this writer then was, felt no restraint in performing their duties. Questioning the system was not their concern. Even corruption in public life was less than in the elected regimes that followed.

The representative government has its own appeal and merit but the common man, it is hard to deny, still looks up to the bureaucracy to solve his problems. Unfortunately, officials are now readily succumbing to political pressures and reaping its fruits in the bargain.

The politicians and bureaucrats now increasingly tend to collude but only to serve their own interests rather than the welfare of the people. The problem is not legal, it is not administrative either. It is moral and should be addressed at that plane.

Kunwar Idris

Karachi

Published in Dawn September 29th, 2016