FOR once in our national experience reality outstrips the hype. The devolution of power/local government plan announced by General Pervez Musharraf is not a smoke conjurer's trick, promising the moon and delivering a dunghill. It is the most serious attempt at restructuring the Pakistani state in our history.

If the import of it has not sunk into most minds, I suspect it is because most people have yet to read the text. Newspapers could have helped to lighten the fog but by writing slipshod and superficial editorials on the subject they have not hastened the cause of national understanding. They need to re-examine this document with greater care.

As for myself I stand chastened. How many times must I not have taken gleeful swipes at General Tanveer Naqvi and his National Reconstruction Bureau, sincerely thinking that the wizards under his command purportedly burning midnight oil, being political tyros, would produce a mishmash of confusion and impractical wisdom. Regarding General Moinuddin Haider I thought that his police reforms (put together by a focal group headed by Zafar Iqbal Rathore) were no better than a pipe-dream. In the event the local government plan and the police reforms are so nicely dovetailed with each other that they make a seamless whole, creating a structure which is more real democracy than the facades and the blown-up images we have experienced in the past. To both the generals therefore I hereby tender (for what these are worth) my profoundest apologies.

But my humility comes with a rider. Will General Musharraf stick to this plan? I say this because over the last ten months his government has turned the notion of a slip betwixt the cup and the lip into an art form. So many bold decisions announced with great fanfare have been followed by the most comprehensive retreats. For General Musharraf's sake I hope it is different this time.

But back to the plan. For most of our lives we have moaned about the over-concentration of power in the bureaucratic state. Well, here at a blow, the bureaucratic state stands denuded of its foundations. The office of district magistrate, the viceregal state's representative in the field, stands abolished, with an elected office-bearer, the district nazim, becoming the executive head of the district. The mandarinate has taken the killing of democracy in its stride, indeed participating in the funeral rites whenever the occasion has arisen. Through upheavals and disasters it has remained unmoved, secure in the knowledge that even if the mountains walk to the sea its power and privileges will remain untouched. How then will this most powerful of tribal orders survive the death of the district magistrate?

Nor is this all. As if to prove that when misfortunes come they come not in single files but battalions, the office of commissioner has also been abolished. The death sentence is a model of brevity: "The Division as an administrative tier will cease to exist." That is all. No extended obituaries. At a stroke the most redundant, the most useless, the most obstructive tier in the obsolescent administrative structure of the Pakistani state is hurled into the trashcan of history.

These reforms should have been introduced by the tribunes of the people, by the titans of democracy. This is what makes the heart weep. Out in the political wilderness these fearless souls fulminate in the harshest tones against the bureaucracy; in power they lose no time in falling into its lethal embrace. It now falls to a military dictator to herald these long over-due changes. Maybe his motives are suspect. Maybe he wants to prolong his rule (something which every wise man will take as a strong probability). But no matter. The spinoff effects of an invention are often more important than the invention itself. So I think is true in this case.

Whether or not Musharraf nurses the ambitions of a Caesar, the changes he has announced reverse a process rooted in the feverish climate of post-1857 India when, in the aftermath of the Mutiny or the War of Independence (take your pick), the British sought the security and preservation of the Raj in a powerful executive, from the district magistrate at the bottom to the viceroy at the top.

Just consider the sweep of the proposed changes. The deputy commissioner, stripped of his powers and in his new incarnation as District Coordination Officer responsible for overseeing the work of the various district departments, viz. health, education, highways, etc, and reporting to the district nazim. The superintendent of police also reporting to the nazim. In both cases the evaluation reports of these officers will be initiated by the nazim who, should the need arise, will also be able to have them transferred after showing due cause. At the district level this is a radical shift of power.

Similarly at the tehsil level, the tehsil nazim will be the head of the tehsil administration. Municipal committees and corporations will be done away with and the tehsil administration will look after town and country. Only the four provincial capitals plus Islamabad will have city governments, later to be extended to some of the other metropolises in the light of the experience gathered.

The zila and tehsil councils will approve the budget (to be prepared under the direction of the nazims), will levy taxes and oversee the functioning of different district and tehsil departments through a mechanism of committees, etc. They will also have the power to recall or dismiss the nazims, there being a procedure for this. But in essential respects the source of local power will be the respective nazims and not the councils. My hunch is that in good time this 'presidential' system will be the model for the provincial and federal governments as well - with power vested in an executive not answerable, except in a roundabout way, to the elected assemblies.

To draw comparisons with the Ayub and Zia models of local government will be fallacious because in those cases power was firmly in the hands of the bureaucracy. Here power in the real sense of the word is being devolved, in quite a radical manner, to elected representatives. The benefits for the military government are obvious. It will get a popular base which will have a vested interest in the success and continuity of the Musharraf regime.

Broad participation, coupled with the destruction of the old viceregal structure, will have an electric effect on small towns and villages where the shadow of the bureaucracy has always loomed large. As the political parties become further marginalized and irrelevant a new political game will be called into existence which will see not only the deputy commissioner but also the old political guard consigned to oblivion.

What further consequences this has for the future of the country I cannot say. All that can be said with certainty is that in preparing and outlining its devolution package, General Musharraf and his colleagues, breaking with established Pakistani tradition, have chosen the bold and intellectually daring path, something which at least I had put beyond them. As the true meaning of this plan starts sinking into the minds of the people at large I have no doubt that there will be a scramble to board the wagon, especially when district and tehsil nazims will be virtual governors and bishops in their respective dioceses. Nothing like the prospect of power to change old ways of thinking.

The heaviest strain will come on the Muslim League whose members, whatever their imprisoned leader may say, will rush to join the hustings. The PPP will be in a fix. Its leader is out, its local cadres too dispirited and disoriented to make much of the local elections. As for the tonga parties who have no muscle to influence any election, they can be expected to take refuge behind an ultra-democratic line, decrying the Musharraf model as a sidetracking of democracy. Ordinary people will not buy this line.The only question is whether General Musharraf will have the tenacity to stick to what he has proposed. As I have already said, his government's record in this connection is not very encouraging. On so many occasions it has said one thing and done another. Whether as a result of second thoughts, late-night pusillanimity or bureaucratic resistance, there is a retreat on this plan, what remains of the government's credibility will fall by the wayside beyond hope of any recovery.

TAILPIECE: General Musharraf has asked his ministers to fan out and spread the word about the good points of the local government plan. Not a smart move at all. When ministers start saying something and Pakistan Television picks up the refrain, people always suspect the worst.