EDITORIAL: While highlighting in a newspaper article what he considers his government’s momentous initiatives, Prime Minister Imran Khan said the most urgent of all challenges facing the country is the struggle to establish rule of law. Expatiating on this undeniable reality, he said that over the last 75 years of its history Pakistan has suffered from “elite capture”, where powerful and crooked politicians, cartels, and mafias had become accustomed to being above the law in order to protect their privileges gained through corrupt system.
While protecting their privileges they had corrupted state institutions, especially those responsible for upholding the rule of law, he added. There is no denying that the present system is heavily skewed in favour of power elites at the expense of social progress and economic development of this county and its people.
The PM, however, seems to see the challenge only where his political rivals are concerned whereas the resistance to rule of law also comes from within the system he presides over. The status quo persists because those who use their positions to benefit from public resources and inequitable relations between the state and ordinary citizens ensure their interests are not undermined.
In this context, it is pertinent to recall that one of Imran Khan’s campaign promises was to eliminate what he described as the culture of thana (police station) and patwari (land record officer at the tehsil level) which favoured the elites to the detriment of the disadvantage sections of society.
During his party’s first government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, he did introduce widely applauded police reforms. But the attempt to do the same in Punjab proved a total flop. At the time some had tried to attribute that failure to cultural differences between the two provinces.
If there was any difference, it was that the elites in Punjab, in particular the government’s allies, were accustomed to having influence over administrative affairs. They had stopped the reform effort in its tracks. Similarly, postings and transfers of revenue officers at the behest of members of the ruling alliance went on as usual.
At least in two reported instances, senior civil service officers concerned wrote letters of protest over this unfair practice to their superiors, but to no avail. The PM surely was aware of such meddling in administrative matters, but preferred to ignore it.
Some point to the Bhutto government’s sweeping administrative reforms of 1973, aimed at controlling the influence of the then mighty bureaucracy over policymaking and implementation, to argue that the present government should have had no hesitation to go ahead with its plans to create even playing fields for all citizens.
But it is not difficult to figure out why it could not do that despite stated intentions. The then government enjoyed comfortable majority in Parliament, the present one can ill-afford to estrange its allies on whose support it depends to stay in office. As admirable as PM Khan’s struggle to establish the rule of law is, his ability to change things for the better where he could is constrained by impediments put up from inside his administration.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022
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