WHO has ruled Pakistan this last half century? In parts, the political class, the bureaucracy and the military. But who amongst these three classes has constituted the core, the essence, of the country's ruling caste? The answer is obvious: boys from the public schools whose main attainment has not been the knowledge of the classics or the mastery of science, either of which would be some consolation, but the use of the English language.

No divide in Pakistan - ethnic, provincial or class - runs deeper than that of language. The language of power in Pakistan (as indeed in India) is English. It is the language of the law, the government and the military. Half-educated lawyers must perforce argue in it and judges with an indifferent command over the language perforce write their judgments in it (which accounts for the unreadable judgments of recent judicial history). Government summaries and communiques are written in English. At the military academy in Kakul raw cadets, many of them from mofussil schools, are taught to become 'gentlemen' in the Sandhurst manner.

The languages of impotence and disenfranchizement are Urdu and the local tongues - great for police constables or truck-drivers but of limited use in the higher spheres of the Islamic Republic. Small wonder then if merit is a whore in Pakistan. A public school accent guarantees not only employment but also success and adequate remuneration. Sure, boys and girls from the vernacular schools also rise to the top. But compared to their counterparts from the convents and the public schools they just have to try that much harder. To the extent then that the old boy network exists in Pakistan, it lies deep within the public schools. If there is a masonic tradition in Pakistan it is this. The religious madrassahs of course are helping create a different kind of old boy network but that's another story.

I am urging, however, no language revolution in Pakistan. That can await the rising of another sun. I am all for English (not least because I earn my bread and butter by it) provided it is not an instrument of exploitation of the many at the hands of the mediocre few, an instrument more powerful than any other in the land. All I am trying to do is to point out a simple truth. The failure of politics in Pakistan is the failure of the public school boys who have ruled the country as politicians, mandarins or super-generals. To say that Pakistan's affairs have been mismanaged has become a truism, a more enduring symbol of the cocktail hour than peanuts or potato chips. But seldom is the blame laid where it belongs: at the doorsteps of the true ruling caste.

Consider the paladins who have ruled Pakistan: Iskander Mirza, Ayub, Yahya, Bhutto, Zia (yes, even Zia, St. Stephen's College, Delhi), Benazir, Nawaz Sharif (yes, even he, St. Anthony's and then Government College, Lahore), Asif Zardari (he ruled Pakistan, didn't he?), Farooq Leghari. These are just the principal actors. Behind them stretch a long line of extras: all hoisted to powerful positions on the strength of the English language. In this feast of mediocrity and incompetence every public school of note has had its share, Aitchison College perhaps taking the prize in this connection. Chiefs' College is also what it likes to call itself. Down the years some roll-call of chiefs it has produced.

Today the wheel has taken another turn. As the sky darkens and the national colours flutter wanly in the evening breeze, it has fallen in great measure to my alma mater, Lawrence College, to provide the chiefs of this dispensation and shoulder the burden of government. If ever there was a chance for the public school fraternity to redeem itself, this was it. Forget the constitutional morality of it. October 12 was a great opportunity provided there was wit and vision enough to profit from it. But, as the evidence of failure mounts, it takes no extraordinary insight to see that the public school fraternity has blown it again. With one difference, however. This time it has blown it with great thoroughness.

But it is not Lawrence College alone that is to blame. The failure it represents is more general. Visit the country's leading clubs and on soft leather sofas you will come across impressive windbags - whisky-cured voices spouting cliches and inanities with an air of wisdom. Such Colonel Blimps are objects of fun even in England, their original home. But in Pakistan for 53 years they have furnished the country its leading statesmen and warriors.

The trouble is this circus, amusing while it lasts, is reaching the end of the road. In the public school hierarchy Aitchison is somewhere at the top, Lawrence College somewhere below on the heights. Beyond Lawrence College there is nothing, just the yawning depths. General Musharraf had no need to put his dogs on display in order to prove his liberal credentials. He and his generals, conscious of it or not, represent the last stand of the public school order as it has prevailed in the army for long. When their failure is played out, who will take their place?

Since the country's birth the public school boys have had the best of everything. Now as the shadows lengthen, it is they and their progeny who are deserting Pakistan. For the labouring or professional classes to seek a better deal outside is nothing. This has been the pattern of movement through the ages. In the 19th century and the early part of the 20th the lowliest Swedes, Italians, Germans and others besides, those who did not have much of a future in their own homelands, looked up at the Statue of Liberty and landed on American shores. But in Pakistan it is the privileged classes which are voting with their feet and getting out of Pakistan. Next door to us, the Afghan aristocracy - in many ways more poised and assured than our own - fled their homeland because of war and revolution. But Pakistan's well-to-do classes, after putting the seal of failure on the country's affairs, are getting out because of an insecurity that can only be explained by the psychology of plunder: the feeling that the till is empty and that the good times are finally over.

This is not the failure of a country. It is the defeatism and intellectual poverty of a parasitic ruling class: incompetent in leadership and ready to abandon the trenches at the first sign of defeat. You may not agree with Lashkar-i-Taiba or, say, Jaish Muhammad, which want to liberate Kashmir by force. But they are imbued with a sense of purpose which gives them strength. The overriding sense of purpose of Pakistan's public school boys is to give their kids a foreign education. To echo Yeats, on one side, a passionate intensity; on the other, the lack of all conviction. It is an unequal battle.

Every country needs a ruling class. There is nothing undemocratic about this. It is just the way how human societies are organized, with a knightly order at the top and drones and workers at the bottom. England has a ruling class and has had one for a thousand years. So does France, Japan, the United States. A hierarchical order of merit and superior accomplishment reigns in all these countries and will reign ten thousand years from now. The only thing is that the knights of a ruling order should be worthy of their vocation through learning and experience. It is just our luck to have a ruling class whose foremost characteristics are greed, incompetence and a knowledge of the English language.

Via the civil service, it is true, men of some learning entered the portals of power. But how many of them could resist the lure of corruption or refrain from exercising authority without regard to law or morality? In general terms, Pakistan's politicians have been feckless and vacillating creatures, lacking both spine and vision, its higher generals witless blunderers, its mandarins past masters at sycophancy and intrigue (and its journalists half-literate breast-beaters). The lights are dimming on their collective performance. What play awaits us next?