One more failed ‘experiment’
Rashed Rahman
Our military establishment appears stubbornly to be clinging
to its long held notions that civilian elected governments, civilian supremacy,
and other basic principles of a democratic polity cannot be ‘afforded’ by the
national security state that it has helped create, nurtured, and clings to in
the face of all the odds. The latest ‘experiment’ in managed or controlled
democracy via the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaaf (PTI) government has fallen flat on
its face in the short period of nine months of incumbency. With the cabinet
reshuffle, particularly former finance minister Asad Umar’s departure, the
government has landed in a cul de sac of its own making.
It appeared when the PTI government came to power in August
2018 that the path to success for it had been paved by the support of the
establishment. However, soon after, it became obvious that the government was
struggling. The more generous among us were willing at first to put this down
to inexperience. However, that charitable view quickly evaporated in the face
of the demonstrated incompetence of Prime Minister (PM) Imran Khan and his
team. The basic reason for this floundering was the misplaced, one-point mantra
of corruption as the root cause of all our troubles and the logical conclusion
from it that past governments of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and Pakistan
Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) had scoured out the state’s finances and left
behind a bloody economic and financial mess. While this mantra still had mileage
in the early days of the PTI government, by now it has worn thin and arguably
proved useless to tackle the serious crises of state and society confronting
the country.
Imran Khan and his team were transfixed, even after coming
into office, by their own endlessly repeated construct, which arguably could
only be considered descriptive rather than analytically incisive. Corruption is
not new to Pakistan. From the early scandal after Independence of the loot sale
surrounding evacuee property claims to the latest charges of raking in
commissions and kickbacks and money laundering this loot through fake bank
accounts, foreign remittances and what have you, there is a continuity that
begs explanation.
Corruption set in in the new state because post-Independence
our political parties (including the founding party, the Pakistan Muslim
League) were mostly composed of opportunists, time-servers and those on the
take by using public office for private gain. At that stage, Pakistan was still
a relatively underdeveloped society with huge hangovers of feudalism and tribal
structures and precious little industry. In other words, we inherited a classic
pre-capitalist, post-colonial state and society and never managed to create the
conditions for a breakthrough from the dead weight of the past, lighting the
way for modernisation and its concomitant institutional constructs.
By the time the state took the initiative in the 1950s to
promote industrialisation by setting up industries and then transferring them
to the blue-eyed boys of the powers-that-be, corruption, in both its
pre-capitalist and modern, capitalist avatars, became a fact of life. The
post-colonial state’s structures and rules of business gave the bureaucracy
carte blanche to skim off bribes because of its hold on all aspects of the
citizen’s life, including economic activity. Once the military emerged in the
mid to late 1950s as not only the dominant arbiter of power, it was perhaps
inevitable that the opportunities for making a quick illegal buck permeated the
top ranks of the armed forces too.
Through the twists and turns in our history, of which the
struggle between military dictatorship and civilian representative rule
remained centre-stage, the permanent condition can be described as a
military-dominated polity, even when the façade of civilian (elected or
‘selected’) rule was evident. By now, the opportunities for graft and skimming
off cream from the state’s day-to-day and development functions is deeply
entrenched, endemic, and difficult to root out. That is why the misplaced
effort to project the partisan accountability process as an anti-corruption cleanup
crusade is losing credibility like water draining through a sieve.
The establishment thinks it knows best what is best for
Pakistan. In its quest to ‘manage’ the country, it has lost us the eastern half
in 1971, alienated the smaller provinces because of real or perceived
grievances against an overweening Centre and Punjab, and produced a crisis of
confidence in the future of this benighted, tragic country. The manifest
failure of the establishment’s latest hobbyhorse, the PTI government, has
produced yet another rabbit out of the former’s seemingly inexhaustible hat. This
time the pretence of an elected government with a cabinet drawn from elected
representatives seems well on the way to being reduced in practice, if not in
theory, to a virtual presidential system with Imran Khan sitting on top of this
heap and governing through an increasingly unelected technocratic setup.
How far this new construct will take us only time will tell.
One thing is certain. Whatever Asad Umar was holding out for in the ongoing
negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is now likely to be
surrendered to the minions of the Bretton Woods institution. Going by the track
record of our previous programmes with the IMF and the considerable experience
of the latter’s nostrums for struggling economies throughout the world, Asad
Umar’s ‘successor’, Hafeez Sheikh, is likely to accept the IMF’s
conditionalities lock, stock and barrel. That implies more pain for the people,
already groaning under unprecedented inflation, increasing unemployment, and
the struggle to make two ends meet that life has been reduced to for the
overwhelming majority.
Corruption is endemic not only because of our inherited
penchant but now increasingly because relatively undeveloped capitalism (which
is where we are) is even worse than developed capitalism in terms of its
unsophisticated, crude corruption practices. So long as we adhere to this model
of development, brace yourselves for more of the same. Corruption is not going
away any time soon, nor is the halting effort to develop along capitalist lines
(without disturbing the feudal status quo). The success stories in the
developing world post-Cold War are those countries that have attached
themselves to the global supply chains structure of capitalism today. Pakistan
is nowhere in this ‘race’.
If the present course fails, for which there are many weighty
arguments, an alternative, radical course will begin to suggest itself sooner
or later. If that happens, the PTI episode may well turn out to be an insignificant
footnote in our history.
rashed-rahman.blogspot.com
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