The digital warriors have nailed it! It is all about governance. You give us good governance and we will be swinging with the mightiest.
Good governance, in turn, is a function of Institutions, which of course require a competent civil service untouched by political expediencies.
One eminent, and highly respected, proponent of strong institutions informs us that Pakistan had a pretty decent governance record, right up to the 90s, despite the four major shocks that visited upon the young state during this period. He attributes it to strong Institutions, nurtured by a meritorious civil service. He sees a definite correlationship between the quality of civil service and national wellbeing. Indeed, if you read his lips you sense causality here, not just a correlationship.
Of course, both institutions and a non-partisan civil service are necessary prerequisites of the modern state. But there are two questions that need to be examined here. First, can a State not falter despite a competent and non-politicised civil service? Second, what does it take to get good working institutions?
We have a tendency to romanticise our 'golden era', when the world wanted to learn from us. South Korea adopting our planning model, PIA helping set up Emirates and Singapore airlines, the successful state enterprises like PIDC etc., are our favourite 'once upon a time' lullabies.
It is true that we literally started from scratch and it will be churlish to deny the role of the civil service in state-formation - and never mind the folklore of their using thorns to pin together government papers. We don't even mind the CSP anointing itself and wearing the crown.
But why did the 'steel frame' become so brittle so quickly, and so eager to hitch a ride with the man on horseback? Did the decay of the civil service not set-in in those halcyon days when, willy-nilly, it ceded space to the powers-that-be - and has never looked back?
And how much of 'institution building' (as distinguished from creating delivery vehicles like Agricultural Development Corporation) can be attributed to the civil service, rather than their being inherited from the Raj? Was it 'native innovation' or the 'gift of tradition' from the colonial masters? (In virtually every single former colony 'institutions' continued to work for quite sometime post-Independence!)
More importantly, what particular governance derivatives (i.e. policy achievements) does the all-powerful service claim credit for?
It certainly grappled well with the humongous settlement issues of a new country that might have been a nation by all canons of international law, but had neither its own currency nor much in its coffers, and was still ruled under Government of India Act 1935 (whose spirit permeated all our constitutions).
But once the dust settled the critical issues facing the country were human development (education, health, population control), a more egalitarian society (at least break the stranglehold of Sardars and Waderas), and national cohesion. How did the institutions respond to these fundamental governance challenges?
Admittedly, the 'institutions', with focus on growth, put some impressive economic runs on the board. Growth was the name of the game and the best of CSP gravitated to the highly coveted 'Economic Pool' sub-cadre (or so we are told by our service friends).
But this relentless pursuit of high growth numbers, virtually throwing all caution to the winds, had two grave consequences for nation building.
It laid the foundations of a highly skewed income distribution that persists till today, and along with that a culture of 'entitlement' and rent seeking. Interestingly, while land reforms were tinkered with no checks or controls on businesses were thought necessary. They were positively encouraged to expand into all areas; and if it meant monopolies, cartels, oligopolies, so be it - a necessary cost of growth. It was perfectly kosher for a business house to use the money of others (through ownership of a bank or an insurance company) to finance its industrial empire.
The embarrassing concentration of wealth that ensued led Mahbubul Haq, perhaps the cleverest economist we have had, to come up with the sticky charge of 'twenty-two families'. That all these 'twenty-two' belonged to the Western wing was not lost on East Pakistan. Nor was the structure of the ruling military-civil service-business complex that consisted almost exclusively of West Pakistanis.
And see how the empire struck back. The basket case of the 70s, Bangladesh, has overtaken us on most counts - from literacy to population control to a working democracy that survived the 'Bangladesh model'. Their reserves, their exports, all their macro-economic indicators snicker at us - and they are not exactly the paragons of good governance (on the corruption index, for example, they rank below us). Their civil service is no less of a revolving door either: with each change of government the 'loyalists' are brought back from darkness.
Then there are the autocratic or charismatic one-man regimes, used to rewarding civil service 'loyalists', and the country none the worse for it. Lee Kwan Yew, Mahathir, Erdogan come immediately to mind. Putin and Xi too can be added to the list if you like. Institutions there carry the imprimatur of the strong man.
It is not at all our intention to denigrate the civil service of the 'golden' era. Nor to downplay the importance of institutions. Our intention is merely to examine the validity of the argument that in those early days we did well because we had good institutions, founded on a competent and 'independent' civil service.
On the touchstone of such critical 'building blocks' of national development as education, health, population control, and national cohesion - and we are staying clear of the Judas-like foreign policy where we betrayed our vision for a few pieces of silver - the acclaimed 'institutions' simply failed us. We acknowledge there was an economic gain in terms of development of industrial, agricultural and services sectors, but it came with egregious inequalities. We can't defend 'institutions' that are there for the benefit of the few, and possibly at the cost of many.
Institutions are vital but it is not enough to have a non-politicised bureaucracy underpinning them. Like all things that matter they have to be demanded by the citizenry.
And a felt demand is never enough. To become real it will have to be voiced, loud and clear - by each one of us.
shabirahmed@yahoo.com