MY first column, last Sunday, on the on-going exercise in futility which is the government and governance of Pakistan, as it has been for far too long — almost the entire life of the country — brought forth many queries as to why I was wasting my time on a futility. My reply was to ask the questioners why they wasted their time bothering about what I consider to be futile.
My e-mailers, all presumably educated, should know as well as I do how difficult it is to deal with and overcome ignorance interwoven with bigotry, myopia and obscurantism.
Some contended that Mohammad Ali Jinnah was the sole leader I ever praise. Well, to my mind Jinnah of course stands alone and above, but if we are to take our leaders, all of them, and attribute to them honesty of purpose, and admit that they were devoid of moral or material corruption, there are only two who would qualify. Jinnah was one and Khwaja Nazimuddin the other — spotless on both counts, the moral and the material. Khwaja’s honesty of purpose was unassailable, but being honest, he was unable to survive and the forces of dishonesty got the better of him. He had to go.
Jinnah during his lifetime would brook not even the slightest whiff of corruption. None can deny that he wished the country he created to be a modern, liberal and democratic nation, in tune with the world of the day. He thought it could happen as we were starting anew. Drawbacks there were, but they were not insurmountable provided the men he worked with and the men he was to leave to follow in his footsteps were of the same mind as he, and had the intent to adhere to his design for his country.
His first exhortation to his Constituent Assembly was that its members remember, and remember well, that a government’s first duty to its citizens is to enforce law and order. He roundly castigated nepotism and corruption which he pronounced to be the worst evils that could befall a government.
One old story, which is not oft told, concerns one of the six ministers he had chosen to help him govern the new country — just six, not eightysix or ninetysix, merely half a dozen. One day he discovered to his chagrin that one of these hand-picked men had allegedly been proven to be corrupt. With the courage of his convictions, and, as is the wont of true statesmen, he decided to act, to give no benefit of the doubt. The very next day the man was axed from his cabinet, sent out of the country, and given the honourable task of representing the Dominion of Pakistan as its ambassador to Afghanistan.
Jinnah was a democrat at heart, but with a dictatorial tendency, necessary in those early trouble-ridden days. During the short period he headed the country, he virtually ruled as a monarch though he made it abundantly clear that the ultimate aim was democracy — the best of the worst forms of government despite its multiple hazards and drawbacks.
He would have had no hesitation in going along with Captain Sir Basil Henry Liddell-Hart, the military historian, who spelt out so succinctly in his book ‘Why Don’t We Learn from History?’ (published 1971) just what are the restraints of democracy. This passage I have repeated time and again as each new democratic dictator has come in, hoping that perhaps some wisdom may rub off on him and a lesson be learnt :
“We learn from history that democracy has commonly put a premium on conventionality. By its nature, it prefers those who keep step with the slowest march of thought and frowns on those who may disturb the ‘conspiracy for mutual inefficiency’. Thereby, this system of government tends to result in the triumph of mediocrity — and entails the exclusion of first-rate ability, if this is combined with honesty. But the alternative to it, despotism, almost inevitably means the triumph of stupidity. And of the two evils, the former is the less.”
How true, how astonishingly true in the case of the Republic of Pakistan, where mediocrity has triumphed to untold heights, where first-rate ability has been missing since September 1948, and where since 1953 honesty in leadership has never shown its face. This country has now become, through long practice, the product of its own brand of despotic democracy fortified by the triumph not only of stupidity but of hypocrisy, intolerance and bigotry.
Liddell-Hart continued : “Hence it is better that ability should consent to its own sacrifice, and subordination to the regime of mediocrity, rather than assist in establishing a regime where, in the light of past experience, brute stupidity will be enthroned and ability may only preserve its footing at the price of dishonesty.”
The ability to do wrong and to do it dishonestly has been and is with us in abundance (what is somewhat distressing is the fact that Transparency International has just declared this present government, dating from 2002, to be more corrupt than its corrupt predecessors of the 1990s, while that of 1999 to 2002 was deemed to be far less). The ability to do the right has never been there, so there has been no question of sacrifice. A regime of sheer mediocrity may do less harm, but only if that mediocrity is channelled towards an honesty of purpose. That has not been our case. Mediocrity combined with brute stupidity and the intent to be dishonest is a lethal mixture — and we know it well to our detriment.
And finally, there are those who ask why I refer to the Republic of Pakistan and not to the Islamic Republic of Pakistan as it is defined in our mangled and mashed Constitution. Well, the country started life as the Dominion of Pakistan and it was not until 1956 (already well on the downward path) that it was declared to be the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
For two years it remained so until the 1956 constitution was abrogated. When President Ayub Khan proclaimed his constitution in 1962 we were known as the Republic of Pakistan until in 1963, for his own expedient reasons, bowing to the then insubstantial pressure of the bearded brigade, Ayub felt himself bound to add ‘Islamic.’ However, does this country deserve this appellation? How has its conduct over the decades fitted in with the tenets of true Islam?