Daily Times

We have all heard that the more things change the more they remain the same. I recall reading somewhere that General Ayub Khan — once president of Pakistan — used to ride a donkey to school when he was a child. Folks rode donkeys in ancient Egypt and Greece 2-3,000 years ago, and they still do in Pakistan. They do not ride donkeys in the US anymore but they do next door in Mexico. This in spite of the fact that airplanes, trains, and a variety of motor vehicles have come in. Old and new, change and continuity coexist. Old ways persist even as new ones appear. Much of change happens imperceptibly without conscious effort on the part of those who adopt it.

Most people fear the untried. They are reluctant to abandon the warmth and comfort to be found in the ‘ruts of routine’. Conscious and deliberate changing is a hassle. One has to determine where to go and then devise means of getting there. This requires inquiry and evaluation of findings. These in turn require thinking, which for most people is a difficult and tiresome exercise that they would like to avoid.

Change at both conscious and unconscious levels has nevertheless been taking place. The old order has been giving way to the new as the existing state has mingled with the novel and created the appearance of newness.

There are practices that existed two thousand years ago, then they disappeared, and much later reappeared even if in slightly different forms. Citizen participation in public affairs, representative assemblies, debate and voting are to be found in ancient Rome and Athens. Then they went out of vogue and remained absent for a thousand or more years. They reappeared in England in the 13th century and subsequently spread to many other places. Their forms today are not quite the same as they were at the beginning but their essence is. Loosely organised political groupings, representing rival ideological persuasions or regional interests, did exist but disciplined political parties, going by prescribed rules and procedures, are a relatively new development.

Democracy and its related institutions may be regarded as a part of political modernisation. Another equally important ingredient of the same process deserves to be noted. It may be assumed that tax collectors and policemen did always exist and function in most societies. But the bureaucracy as an institution — tightly organised groupings of functionaries, placed in hierarchical relationships from the highest to the lowest levels of power and responsibility, bound by established rules and procedures relating to entry, promotion, disciplining and termination, classification, grading, and remuneration — is something new.

Shopkeepers and artisans have always existed pretty much all over the world. But the corporation as a trading and manufacturing organisation surfaced with the advent of the machine age and large scale factory production system. The East India Company, regarded as the mother of modern corporations, came to India as a trading outfit in 1707 (based successively in Surat, Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta) and in less than a hundred years it turned into a political entity. It raised armies, fought wars to subdue local princes and emerged as the ruling authority in much of India.

Many observers believe that the Congress and other representative bodies notwithstanding, real power in the US lies with the larger corporations. It is corporate America, not the American people, which rules the country and much of the outside world. Corporations may not have the same kind of sway elsewhere but one may be sure that they have devised ways by which they can exert considerable influence on the making of public policy. This, once again, is a relatively new development.

Let us now see how old and new are faring in Pakistan. There is hardly anything that is entirely new. The difference between old and new is more one of degree than of kind. What we call the new is the old that has undergone such great change as to have been transformed. Keeping this qualification in mind, let us see what we find.

Media expansion has taken place on such a huge scale and its impact on various departments of social interaction has been so sweeping that we can call it a new development. Knowledge of contemporary affairs, both domestic and foreign, and political awareness among the common people have increased enormously. Heightened interest in music and the visual arts, especially painting, is a recent development. Many more young people than ever before are singing and the sounds they create are beautiful.

We have always had our share of preachers and religious revivalists. The emergence of a group whose members go out and impose upon others by force their own version of Islam (the Taliban) is a new development.

The Constituent Assembly of Pakistan (1947-56) included only two women members. Now more than 60 women sit and debate in the National Assembly. A fair number of them became physicians and teachers even in the old days. Now there is hardly a profession or occupation in which they are not present in large numbers: there are women lawyers, judges, architects and engineers, pilots of military and commercial flights, soldiers, bankers, industrial and business proprietors and managers. There are more women than men in the student bodies of most public and private educational institutions. Women’s greatly expanded presence and role in public life are a new development.

The public domain in Pakistan remains unchanged. The military, the ISI and other intelligence agencies, police, and the civilian bureaucracy are for the most part well-organised and internally cohesive institutions, doing their assigned or self-elected work reasonably well. The politicians occupying the helm to direct the apparatus of governance (prime minister, chief ministers, and members of their cabinets), like their predecessors, do not know which way to go and how to get there. The same holds for the people’s elected representatives sitting in assemblies and councils at various levels. Nor do they have any great desire to discover the dimensions of the public interest and the means that should be devised and assembled to achieve it. These centres of power continue to be dominated by the feudal lords to whose thinking notions of the public domain and public interest are foreign. They are moved almost exclusively by considerations of their personal interest. Political parties have their councils and executive committees but in effect they remain aggregations of persons revolving around a charismatic or otherwise influential individual.

The writer, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, is currently a visiting professor at the Lahore School of Economics. He can be reached at anwarsyed@cox.net