Tuesday, April 23, 2019

Business Recorder Column April 23, 2019

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

No comments:

Post a Comment