December 31, 2005

COMING back to the native shores is always a fascinating experience for a ‘prodigal son’, even if his focus of interest may scan a familiar or known territory.

Years of peregrinations in lands far removed, in more senses than one, from the terra cognita of the native soil adds a tingling aroma of adventure to one’s homecoming. What the native son may have taken for granted as home turf beckoning to its lush green hospitality suddenly throws open trap doors that take him, if not devour him, by complete surprise. Therein lies both adventure and challenge wrapped in an unfamiliar packaging.

This writer thought he knew Pakistan’s bureaucracy and all that it stands for because he had been a part of it for well over 35 years and believed he knew it inside out. But that was before I packed my bags and went off to live in distant Canada where everything is so very different from Pakistan, including its bureaucratic culture.

Canada had been a crown colony for nearly as long as the lands now comprising Pakistan were possessions of the British ‘Raj’. But Canada got rid of the colonial yoke 80 years before we did so, although it still remains loyal to the British crown and swears fealty to the Queen as its sovereign.

Pakistan, on the morning of its birth, decided to put paid to its allegiance to the British crown. That was as much an act of defiance to the raj as an assertion of its newly acquired sovereign complexion. But then we did something that the Canadians never thought of doing: we swore never to do away with the colonial legacy of governance of which a hawkish and suspecting bureaucracy was the linchpin.

My guard against the colonial fetish of our bureaucracy should have gone up when, about a year back, I was asked to fill out a sheaf of application blanks for my pension. Among these overly detailed blanks was a question asking the applicant to state when and where did he serve in a British colony abroad! I read and re-read that particularly prickly question a dozen times, at least, in order to make absolutely certain that I wasn’t being taken, mistakenly, for a retired civil servant of the raj. It was only afterwards that the unsavoury truth started to sink into me like a dart hitting the bull’s eye. We were, in fact, far more loyal to our colonial bequest than the innovating Canadians could ever aspire to be.

But even that galling fracas with reality couldn’t have mentally prepared me for what was in store this time around during a forcibly extended, month-long, stay in the glitzy capital city of Pakistan, basking in the alluring warmth of a sunny November-December. My five years in Canada seemed to have totally disoriented me from expecting to experience what I thought was history. What I shouldn’t have forgotten is that history is into this terribly annoying habit of repeating itself, ad nauseam, in Pakistan.

That the bureaucracy in Pakistan has perversely retained the colonial masters’ distrust of the natives came jarringly home to me within no time in Islamabad. Not only just retaining the colonial distrust of the wogs, the mandarins of the Islamic Republic have further honed the practice to the dismay of one like me who has lately been living in an ambience where everyone, old or new Canadian, is given the benefit of trust unless the devil in him abuses that trust.

In Pakistan, however, the native syndrome infects you with deadly precision when you find yourself sitting on the ‘other’ side of the desk. A bureaucrat in power is worth his weight in gold, especially in a system of spoils and privileges. But this gold is reduced to the metal of trinkets the moment his seat is removed from under him. It takes no time for him to be reduced to the ranks of ordinary mortals. He then finds himself defending and arguing his record from a station of utter weakness; he is like a defendant in the dock saddled with a plethora of suspected guilt. It’s up to him to prove that the charges against him have only spurious foundation laid on sheer cusedness.

The bureaucratic defence against a tortuous red-tape working to its draconian limits is that there ought to be fulsome accountability of tax-payers’ money. None could possibly argue against that. But no one mentions the other fact, at the same time, that in this ‘land of the pure’ it’s only the government servants that pay their taxes in full. They are les miserables who don’t have any avenue open to them to evade taxes, something the high and mighty of the land do with such impunity and regularity. But then the high and mighty lording over the land aren’t the ones made to go through the wrenching experience of begging for the grant of a pension.

The inescapable bottom line, therefore, is that a pensioner must be hauled up at the bar of ‘accountability’ for every penny owed by him to the exchequer, largely because of the accounting wizardry of an overzealous auditor. A pension may well be the right guaranteed to a retiring civil servant but he can’t enter the ‘promised land’ of tranquillity till death until he is prepared to walk the plank; and there is no guarantee that he would come out of the ordeal unscathed or unsigned by the fire lit under his feet.

What makes the penny-wise accountability gallingly painful is that the same exchequer the poor would-be pensioner is suspected of robbing through thievery is being lavished with regal munificence on the denizens of power alcoves and niches that have proliferated in abundance over the years since this prodigal son took leave of his native shores.

Pakistan’s politics had been feudalized long time ago, a fact since accepted as a fundamental ground reality. But the contagion didn’t, apparently, stop there or remain confined to politics; feudalism has spread its ugly tentacles and infected the corpus of bureaucracy with a vengeance, not entirely an unwelcome development for a cowering body hankering for patronage and succour.

So what one sees with naked eye and also experiences through interaction with both the privileged and un-privileged classes, is that the feudals of bureaucracy are being loaded and plied with perks and benefits — previously unheard of — as much as the feudals of politics and power. The number of official and staff cars, with their stand-out green number plates, has multiplied in Islamabad with proverbial leaps-and-bounds. It’s taken for granted as a routine affair that a top bureaucrat must have access to more than one officially-maintained, and paid for, spanking new car for himself and his family. The availability of plush official residences, guest houses and rest houses has also proliferated in both numbers and the comfort levels of these sanctuaries.

Islamabad’s salubrious landscape is now dotted increasingly with a host of ‘colonies’ for the privileged people. Our fixation with colonial culture is being translated in stucco houses of concrete and glass in the Judges Colony, the Ministers Colony et al, along with umpteen number of ‘lodges’, rest houses and guest-houses, with burgeoning legions of retainers, servants, cooks, bearers and drivers. Typical to the trappings of feudalism, these official colonies have a larger presence of ‘domestic help’ than the number of ‘sahibs’; and that’s understandable because the ratio of retainers to sahib is at least four-to-one.

Feudalism is a system of privileges, spoils and commands. Spoils in it are the reward for commands executed without demur and dissent. Feudals trust only the unsuspecting and unquestioning among their minions. A bureaucrat is as good as a minion in a feudal system; his reward, perks and privileges are guaranteed only in return for his fealty and loyalty, above everything else. Performance is not a criterion and, hence, of little value and consequence if not packaged in abiding fealty.

Islamabad’s bureaucracy is no exception to this feudal rule-of-the-thumb. The oily faces one sees in the teeming dining rooms of the Islamabad Club — no refuge for the scoundrels, according to its membership criterion — or on its carefully-laid-out Tennis courts, or in its exquisitely-done Cards Room, are of bureaucrats who have found the mantra of blessed survival. They have drunk deep at the font of feudal mentors and come up with the magic potion of longevity of their tenures. Their perks and privileges are guaranteed to them as long as they play out their assigned roles of dutiful minions facilitating the power lust of their mentors and masters.

This perks-laden bureaucratic culture, by its very nature, is the antithesis of accountability and efficiency. But who cares for these outmoded values that went out of fashion along with the solar hat and riding breeches of the gora sahibs. The new, brown and tanned, sahibs have replaced it with a more enduring culture, thriving and yielding a rich harvest in the fertile land of Islamabad. But one gets an abiding sense of it only when one sits on the other side of the desk in its richly appointed offices with the begging bowl of a would-be pensioner in one’s hands.

The writer is a former ambassador.

Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window)