‘Wisdom doesn’t always wear a suit’ — or a uniform

Columnist HUMAYUN GAUHAR wrote this article for THE NATION to whom we are grateful for giving us permission to publish.

If had Mr. Jinnah indeed said, as reputed, that each successive government in Pakistan would be worse than its predecessor, it was truly prophetic. The primary, the original, indeed tragic, reason for Pakistan not progressing is that none of its governments has been any good while far too many have been terrible. The first was besieged by unimaginable problems in hostile conditions, with the Indians working overtime to make Pakistan collapse and a petulant Mountbatten egging them along. Add the Mountbatten-Nehru-Patel cabal’s perfidy over Kashmir and we had a perfectly hostile environment to contend with.

It was the beginning of the Cold War. Those were aggravating times characterised by the loss of the most basic of diplomatic niceties. John Foster Dulles refused to shake Zhou En Lai’s extended hand in the United Nations and Nikita Kruschev banged his shoe on the rostrum of the UN General Assembly. Beleaguered by intrigue and beset by animosity an adolescent Pakistan unthinkingly fell into the waiting embrace of the US, as was envisaged in the Anglo-American pre-Partition plan all along. After the Baghdad Pact we joined CENTO and SEATO to help America thwart the spread of Soviet communism. In so doing we deluded ourselves into believing that we had found protection. The Americans took a base at Badaber and Kruschev drew a red circle around Peshawar on his map after a U2 from there was shot down by the Soviets and pilot Gary Powers captured.

The futility of the ‘protection’ theory was exposed in the 1965 war by the US excuse that we were not under communist attack and again in 1971 when India dismembered us despite the fact that we were under camouflaged Soviet attack. All that happened was that Kissinger and Huang Hua discussed what the future of rump Pakistan ought to be. America only woke up when the USSR occupied Afghanistan (ironically after we had left CENTO and SEATO) because their self-interest was involved.

The 1947 domestic environment was no better. Refugees poured into Pakistan in droves and were concentrated in and around Karachi instead of being dispersed. This led to today’s ethnic problem that has turned Karachi from a dynamo into an inferno. Fresh elections to a constituent assembly were not held in the mistaken belief that the migrant politicians had no constituency. We persisted with the assembly elected before Partition, making it easy to make and unmake governments. Our founding fathers died early and the bureaucracy, backed by the army, was able to grab power in the absence of a constitution and democratic institutions. Nine years and seven governments after independence came a flawed constitution that was never allowed to function because the army finally came to the fore. Followed another flawed constitution, a second military ruler, the dishonouring of elections, civil war, war and dismemberment. To the loser went the spoils. He proceeded to ravage the economy in the name of a half-baked socialism. Followed 11 more years of dictatorship which do not bear thinking about. Then came 11 years of democracy that was a sham because the army and bureaucracy made it so by making their Bonsai politicians play musical chairs, unseating every government before its time. This lent credibility to the belief that the 1973 Constitution could not deliver, that politicians and politics were corrupt, and only the army could pull our many irons out of the fire. This it has been trying to do with unmitigated gusto since October.

India, on the other hand, persisted with democracy. In the process it got good governments and bad, unstable governments and even comical ones. But it has come out stronger and better from the experience. We are still trying to discover our identity.

Why we have this original problem of bad governments is that we never could arrive at a consensus on what Pakistan was meant to be, a theocratic state run by de facto clerics masquerading as scholars or a modern state run on Islamic principles. In an earlier article I had mentioned that what was missing was a blueprint authored by the founding fathers about what the Pakistani State should be. All we have are Mr. Jinnah’s speeches and statements to go by. Taken together and chronologically they leave no doubt that Pakistan was envisaged as a homeland for India’s Muslims to be a model, modern, democratic Islamic state where all citizens, regardless, would be equal. Sadly, because our rulers have been weak in the knowledge and understanding of their faith, they have pandered to mullahs. Instead of focusing on the responsibilities of the Muslim State, they have been concentrating on the duties of the individual Muslim, which is none of the business of the State. Before providing justice, equality, food, education and health, the State introduced the contentious Muslim penal code and harassed the individual Muslim regarding concerns which are only between him and his Maker and which the State has nothing to do with. Instead of reflecting on their own real intent, which has been power, privilege and pelf, our rulers have been judgmental about the intent of the citizen; who are real Muslims and who are not and what should be done with the latter. Perhaps this particular State imagines that not only can it fool all of the people all of the time, but that it can fool God too.

Now yet another experiment in system of government is emerging from the anvil. The first installment is the devolution plan for local government. I have been asked why I haven’t written about the devolution plan. What is there to write? That a federation needs maximum devolution down to the local level there can be no doubt about. But it must be real devolution, not cosmetic. After forcing myself to read that excruciatingly boring document written like a university student’s essay, the initial observation has to be that a local government plan is part of a national plan of governance, federal and provincial. What is its context? How can it be judged in a vacuum? What national system are we going to have? The existing parliamentary one, or a presidential system or a mixture, like the French? What is the position of the provinces going to be in relation to the federal and district governments and legislatures? How can one judge the whole by looking at only a part? Perhaps Father (as in re-founding father or surrogate father) Tanvir Naqvi is a romantic and can tell if a girl is pretty simply by looking at her foot. I certainly cannot.

No devolution plan is worth the paper it is written on unless the power of taxation is devolved with it. As long as a government is dependent on handouts from a higher government, it remains only an administrative arrangement rejoicing in the name of government.

Democracy, like freedom, is not divisible. Indirect elections through electoral colleges are democracy dividers for they betray lack of faith in the people. But they do help in ensuring ‘positive’ results. Is that why district ‘nazims’ (mayors) and their deputies are to be elected indirectly, so that ‘undesirables’ don’t get in?

Why have democracy dividing partyless elections? Again, to ensure ‘positive’ results? The right of association is guaranteed in the Constitution. How can that right be taken away? And if all citizens are equal, what is the need for separate electorates?

The ultimate democracy divider is limiting electoral eligibility by certificates of education. All that the requirement of being at least a matriculate for a ‘nazim’ and deputy nazim will do is raise the black market prices of these degrees. Someone should tell these NRB gentlemen the difference between education, knowledge and wisdom. A person can obtain as many degrees as he likes, but knowledge is another matter, and wisdom yet another. Education is not a necessary precondition to acquiring knowledge or wisdom. When God created Adam there were no schools or colleges. And God said that He gave Adam knowledge and that too in an instant. So it was with our Holy Prophet (PBUH) who had no formal education but who was given knowledge and wisdom by the Almighty, the greatest university of them all. By Father Naqvi’s yardstick, Akbar the Great would not be eligible to be mayor of a district though he was one of the most successful rulers of India. Nor would Sher Shah Suri, who made the original motorway. And, God help me, nor would any of the 124,000 prophets, at least not in this Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the country made in the name of God.

Ask yourself: what have our Oxford-educated leaders ever have done for us? Degrees alone from Oxford and Cambridge, Harvard and LSE, IBA and LUMS, Sandhurst and PMA don’t necessarily give you knowledge or wisdom. You have to kneel down and kiss the earth to get to know the heartbeat of your land and the pulse of your people. You have to learn to look beyond your lifetime. Without ‘jazba’, passion and fervour, rapture and devotion, you cannot serve your people and your land. Knowledge and wisdom reside outside university degrees just as ‘the heart of the sword resides outside the sword’.

Father Naqvi and his wizkids would do well to learn from the advertising slogan of ABN-Amro Bank: ‘Wisdom doesn’t always wear a suit’. One should add that neither does it necessarily wear a uniform.

For our friends from the brass there is much to learn from the joke about the brigadier who fell down a well. Two soldiers threw down a rope to pull him up. As he surfaced they saluted and let go of the rope and the poor brigadier fell in again. This went on a few times until the distraught brigadier, dying to be extricated, shouted, “Get some civilians, this is not your work.”