Saturday, October 02, 2010
Bureaucracy: how the rot set in
Roedad Khan
The writer is a former federal secretary
Albert Guerard, the fiercely democratic French historian, once exclaimed: "So long as the bureaucrat is at his desk, France survives."
What is it that is holding Pakistan together? Is it the fake democracy? Is it our rubberstamp parliament? Is it the Potemkin political institutions dotting the country? Is it the coercive power of the state? Or, as in France, is it the bureaucrat at his desk who keeps the flag flying?
This is what the Father of the Nation had to say on the role of bureaucrats. "Governments are formed, governments are defeated, prime ministers come and go, ministers come and go, but you stay on. And, therefore, there is a very great responsibility placed on your shoulders. You are the backbone of the state," he remarked in an informal talk with civil servants in Government House, Peshawar, in April 1948. Mr Jinnah's words still ring in my ears.
On the premise that Pakistan would encounter insurmountable problems in setting up the new state in the chaotic conditions that attended partition, it was decided that an official controlling the entire government machinery, working directly under Mr Jinnah, the governor general, was needed for coordination and speedy decisions. Chaudhry Muhammad Ali was appointed secretary general. He was a very able officer with a long experience in the finance department of the Government of India, a man of prodigious energy and hard rightwing views.
By a cabinet resolution, the secretary general was given the right to direct access to all the secretaries and all the files. To reinforce his position, Chaudhry Muhammad Ali set up a "Planning Committee" (as distinct from the Planning Commission, which was to be set up in the mid-1950s), of which secretaries of all the ministries were members.
Through the mechanism of the Planning Committee presided over by the secretary general, the entire state apparatus was able to function as a unified machine under a single head, more or less, independently of the cabinet. The Planning Committee was, in effect, a "parallel cabinet" of civil servants, with the secretary general functioning as "prime minister".
With the assassination of Liaquat Ali Khan in 1951, and the elevation of Ghulam Muhammad to the high office of governor general, the post of secretary general was abolished. As a consequence, while in one respect the power of bureaucracy was consolidated through the governor general, since he was a former bureaucrat, in another respect it was made less effective, as it had now to be mediated through the cabinet. The political leadership now acquired greater significance, for the power of the bureaucracy could not be exercised without the manipulation of the political leadership and occasional confrontation with it.
The political leadership at the Centre resented Ghulam Muhammad's authoritarian methods and resolved to rein him in. In October 1954, proposals were introduced in the Constituent Assembly for the curtailment of the governor general's powers, in particular to abolish the arbitrary powers under the Government of India Act, 1935, which allowed him to dismiss any ministry, even if it enjoyed parliament's confidence.
Before these amendments could take effect, Ghulam Muhammad declared a state of emergency on Oct 4, 1954, dissolved parliament with a nod from the military and assumed full powers. Under the dubious "doctrine of necessity", the governor general's illegal act was given a semblance of legitimacy by a pliant superior judiciary.
Ghulam Muhammad then appointed a new cabinet. Muhammad Ali Bogra became prime minister In place of Khwaja Nazimuddin and Chaudhry Muhammad Ali was asked to carry on as finance minister. And the biggest surprise of all surprises, Gen Ayub Khan became defence minister, although he retained his position of commander-in-chief of the Pakistani army. Defence secretary Iskandar Mirza, Pakistan's eminence grise, became minister of the interior. These individuals, who essentially represented the power of the military-bureaucratic oligarchy, referred to themselves as the "Ministry of All Talents."
Initially, the army was a junior partner, but its power and influence increased rapidly through the 1950s. Ghulam Muhammad then turned to Gen Ayub Khan, asking him to take over power in the name of the army. Ayub Khan declined. He had his own plans and his own timetable and could afford to wait. The rest, as they say, is history.
During the last 62 years, the country has lived in a state of permanent political crisis. Governments rose and fell with dizzy rapidity, some lasting but a few months, and nearly all of them set up and soon overthrown as a result of trivial intrigues in the corridors of power or military interventions. All this weakened the Republic from the beginning and paved the road to disaster.
Amid so much political instability how could the Republic continue to function and its ephemeral governments manage the business of government? What held the country together more than anything else and enabled Pakistan to function tolerably well was the steady hand of the permanent establishment. It comprised various organs, run and staffed by permanent civil servants, which administered the law, the legislation passed by parliament and the acts and services of government. In its strange but steady exertions one can see much of the secret of the solidity and continuity of life in Pakistan despite the toppling of regimes, dictatorships, the execution of an elected prime minister. In the 20th century a good deal of this bureaucracy seemed to be an anachronism, an apparatus musty from age. In reality it was one of the foundations of the Republic.
Elected and unelected rulers would come and go, some of them whiling away much of their time in the West at the tax payer's expense. Parliaments might be suppressed; ministers might spend most of their time in their hometowns, or abroad, the permanent bureaucracy, the officials high and low, the deputy commissioners, the magistrates, the civil and criminal courts, the revenue officers, the lowly clerks, the postmen, the police officers manning the police stations, the engineers and doctors -- they saw to it that the machinery of government ground away.
Taxes were collected, accounts kept, justice dispensed, and public services and civil order for the most part maintained. Honest to a degree unknown or unpractised among the parliamentarians and cabinet ministers, industrious in a plodding sort of way and fairly efficient, possessed of a strong sense of public duty, of a remarkable esprit de corps, and of a pride in their professional code, but also woefully unprogressive and unresponsive to the demands of the evolving society, they were a pillar of the state. Like the French permanent establishment, they saw to it that the business of government got done even in the most chaotic moments.
Once the civil service was the backbone of the state. No longer. Successive governments have reduced public servants to the level of domestic servants. The service we inherited on independence, known for its integrity, objectivity and political neutrality, has over the years been thoroughly mutilated, demoralised, politicised, corrupted and changed beyond recognition, and is now a ghost of its former self.
Not surprisingly, when tragedy struck in the greatest flood in our history, one fifth of the country went under water and millions of people were rendered homeless, there was nobody to look after them. Elected representatives of the people just vanished and were not to be seen anywhere. Civil administration was paralysed.
The lesson of history is that when the dykes of administration crumble, revolutions begin.
Email:
roedad@comsats.net.pk,
www.roedadkhan.com