Some of us read newspapers daily, even in this era of social media and pencil-thin attention spans – and I am one of them. It has its benefits, including being informed about what is going on – locally and globally, reinforcing focused reading as a daily ritual and, most interestingly, knowing how a certain policy or step of the government is failing, at worst, and flailing, at best.
In this merry-go-round of critiques, we see regurgitation of the same problems with new statistics: X millions of school children are out of school, X per cent mortality rate, X billion tax gap, X trillion wasted due to corruption, X million pushed under the poverty line, X positions down in climate and gender indices, and so on. Then, after this incantation, we behold solutions (mostly, objectives – what should be achieved – masquerading as solutions): actionable, time-bound, and responsibilities assigned. What we usually don’t come across are the reasons (causes) behind the predicament (symptoms).
Now, let’s do some very basic arguments: a problem exists either unintentionally (stupidity) or intentionally (political economy). Let’s go with the first option: our government is stupid. Our policymakers, despite graduating from the renowned universities, are not up to the mark. Our politicians are illiterate. The executive arm is also quite inept.
Then why are solutions presented anyway? We need some governance sanity, ab initio, for any ‘structural reform’, right? Why don’t consultants first provide a roadmap to end this stupidity once and for all by suggesting a course in some foreign country? Also paradoxically, notwithstanding all the stupidity, we also claim our government is corrupt from head to toe. Doesn’t hacking of a system require a certain acumen? Or the whole system is so stupid that only the stupid can milk it? I will let the sane reader decide.
This is a unique and eccentric comprehension. As is explained by Anjum Altaf in his book ‘What we get wrong about education in Pakistan’: In economics, we assume that each player tries his/her best to secure the most lucrative self-interest, but when it comes to government, we somehow forget it.
Another example in the same book is that of Balochistan. If a feudal lord – just like the American South before Civil War – doesn’t allow children nurturing under the lord’s fiefdom to go to school as education may disclose fundamental rights to them, and they may start questioning the feudal, it is outright understood as an intentional sinister act but if 26.2 million children are out of school nationally, it is not considered evil; rather it is considered a structural blip, which consultant’s short term, medium term, and long term prescriptions – without any effect on governmental foot print – will solve pristinely.
And this not-so-discussed explanation makes more sense and extends beyond education, after all, who is stupid enough not to know what and why rudimentary necessities need to be fulfilled, say: clean water, smog-free air, good quality health, gender equality, etc. Without this in mind, the op-ed section, as well as white papers and policy briefs, are, more or less, inked pages that explain problems in great detail without identifying the leviathan behind the mess.
On the other hand, fundamental questions remain: Why is our country always on the verge of insolvency? Why is the middle class consuming its savings? Why are our people still impoverished, while the rich are getting richer? Who is getting what benefits? There must be some leaking streams in the bucket; the Orwellian world, with all its manifestations, including in the legal, economic, political and social realms, is not blossoming mechanically, but through a deliberate design of governance. Ergo, there remains no technical problem, in itself, in the country; rather, every problem is, in one way or another, connected to the political economy.
One can trace this egregious situation back to colonial times: the blind transplantation of a democratic superstructure (elections, adult franchise, political parties and political ideologies) onto a hierarchical and unequal substructure in South Asia. In a context marked by entrenched social class differences, theologically sanctioned inequalities, political parties running as private enterprises of an individual or a family and widespread economic deprivation, such a system was never a perfect fit.
This mismatch gave rise to patron-client formations, resembling 12th-century European lordship. In this arrangement, lords (whom we might call lotas) seek to maximise their power by currying favour with the king (Voldemort) while dispensing patronage to clients in all the wrong ways (bhartia). This system of patronage fosters dynastic rule, conflates lordship with the state, and produces electoral promises divorced from reality. It also results in the absence of three fundamental elements of democracy, necessary for the transition from lordship to governance: accountability, official conduct and social purpose.
While there can be many reasons attributed to the absence of true, potent democracy. The most relevant is that, historically, the political institutions of the Muslims, right from the start, lacked deep roots in the public. The Muslim League largely represented the Muslim elite, particularly from minority provinces such as UP, Bengal and Bombay. And so, unlike India with mature political parties, democracy here remained fragile, resulting in pervasive adhocism, political, financial and administrative precariousness, and a failure to restrain the predatory behaviour of neo-colonial institutions, or what Hamza Alavi termed the “overdeveloped state”: a state that towered over society rather than being shaped by it; and the rest, as they say, is history.
There remains then no solution but to demand accountability from below, thereby transforming the client-patron relationship into more sophisticated political institutions, capable of fostering true democracy. A counter-narrative suggests that this is a circular error: it is not in the interest of those in power to remain accountable, and they will therefore repress such demands as much as possible. I agree. Yet we must still begin – slowly and deliberately, it will take time, but we can make some progress. That’s the only way forward, right now.
Coda: I wish I could have presented some report-ready, specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound solutions here.
The writer is a Peshawar-based researcher who works in the financial sector. He can be reached at: [email protected]
