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WIN the crowd and you shall win the fight; this was the advice that would be dispensed to the gladiators as they prepared for their fights in Rome’s Colosseum. The events that unfolded last week in the political arena of Pakistan were nothing less than those contests.
The opening line of this article can perhaps be adapted to local circumstances: it is said that if you win the bureaucracy, you win Punjab and if you win Punjab, you win Pakistan. As prime minister, Imran Khan failed to recognise that winning edge.
Dr Ishrat Husain, who was adviser to the former prime minister on institutional reforms, in his book Governing the Ungovernable, writes that “after all it was the imperative track record of the Punjab government under the leadership of Chief Minister Shehbaz Sharif during the 2008-13 period which won the votes for PML-N”. He further goes on to narrate how nepotism and party loyalty undermined merit, which became the cause of disillusionment with the PML-N among the educated middle class that subsequently led to the rise of the PTI.
Now coming to the fall of the PTI, the reasons for it might seem complex but, in fact, they are as simple as those of its rise. One of them is the inability of Imran Khan to deliver on his promise of good governance, especially in Punjab. He was unable to truly win the support of the bureaucracy and to motivate the latter to go beyond the line of duty to sincerely work for the people.
The bureaucracy saw Imran Khan as a threat, as someone ready to throw it under the bus to pursue an absolutely political agenda. This perception cemented the image of the former prime minster as someone in whose tenure civil servants had to lie low, stay idle, pass time in as uneventful a manner as possible so that they did not end up in trouble. Except for a handful of civil servants serving directly with the former prime minister, this was the general idea in the bureaucracy, and sadly, in his tenure that spanned almost four years, no effort was made to allay these misgivings.
The bureaucracy lay low during Imran Khan’s tenure.
Imran Khan often said that the fear of losing makes you lose before the contest; ironically, he himself became the perfect proof of the theory. The fear of losing prominence kept Imran Khan from appointing a strong chief minister in Punjab and that fear resulted in the appointment of Usman Buzdar, a chief minister who failed to inspire the bureaucracy or the public.
The bureaucracy having worked with Shehbaz Sharif, who had set very high standards of governance, felt a certain disillusionment. Imran Khan’s maxim seemed to have been ‘I, alone, will fix it’ rather than ‘we, together, will fix it’. And that sealed his fate.
Like, for example, Imran Khan failed to hold the high-powered board meeting to consider the promotion of officers from Grade 21 to 22, which had been due for almost two years by the time he left office. It sums up how preoccupied he was with opposing the opposition rather than focusing on governance.
Furthermore, it has been learnt that the prime minister was conducting informal interviews of candidates for promotion from BS-21 to BS-22, ahead of the high-powered board meeting in order to assess for himself before the official meeting. Such actions potentially overlook many able officers based on personal and political biases, which can further alienate them from their job.
Read: Does PTI have a future?
In fact, there was a lot of uneasiness about this snap evaluation among senior bureaucrats. The proper way would have been to reform the system and trust it to pick the correct individual, evaluated over a period of three decades rather than 30 minutes of an interview. Individual judgement can never beat a systemic assessment, but no serious efforts were made in that direction. Trying to resolve every problem based on individual judgement can work on a cricket field but rarely does so in the running of a government.
Similarly, the civil service reforms prepared by a task force on civil service reforms headed by Dr Ishrat Husain and approved by the cabinet also did not see the light of the day and the document must now be gathering dust on some shelf at the Prime Minister’s Secretariat.
Lastly, Imran Khan came across as a prime minister in a hurry. A bit like a tsunami, which disrupted a lot of things, the initial waves he generated were very strong, but with time, they subsided, leaving almost all projects that were started unfinished. Or since we are fond of drawing cricketing parallels in politics, it was like a team chasing a huge total that started out strong, but lost wickets in the middle overs, followed by total collapse towards the end, thus falling well short of the target.
The question remains, can he reflect on his performance and make a comeback? For the sake of Pakistan, he should.
The writer is a former civil servant.
Twitter: @SyedSaadat55
Published in Dawn, April 14th, 2022
