Daily Times

After seven decades, we could not decide which system of governance is suitable and workable for a country claimed to be created on the basis of an ideology. Currently, once again, the target is the parliamentary system held responsible for all the wrongs under the sun.

However, no system can work when its detractors and spoilers are more powerful than its creators and supporters. Ironically, parliamentary system always remained a target of the mindset and its auxiliaries who never accepted the agency of collective wisdom of the people and their intrinsic right to source of power. The presidential system did not work while the parliamentary system was not allowed to work by the powers to be.

Dr Attaur Rehman, professor of chemistry, a former federal minster and chairman of the Higher Education Commission in Musharraf’s regime, also joined the club of demanding a presidential system. Recently he had penned an article for an English daily that painted a rosy picture of the presidential system while attributing every evil to the current parliamentary system. A cursory glance over his article indicates either his political naiveté or a bureaucratic loathe for people’s power, wisdom and alleged incapacity to govern.

First, instead of the people, the professor prefers the institutions to tailor a governing system to create ‘philosophers’ kings’ to rule common mortals. His oversight is a failure to recognise a sea difference in running a state and an institution. Institutions need specialised skills with a chain and unity of command in a regimentalised environment to carry out specific tasks on behalf of the state. However, this mechanical bureaucratic administrative approach has been challenged in favour of humanistic approach.

The day we succeed in making our Parliament and the Prime Minister strong enough to be answerable only to the will of the people and not to the whims of baton wielders, we will have started our journey towards prosperity

Secondly the state is not merely a narrow bureaucratic administrative unit but a vast social organisation that encompasses diverse layers of societal currents, conflicting interests and inspirations that surpass the limits of utilitarian boundaries. No bird can be happy in a golden cage. Therefore, satisfaction cannot be defined merely in terms of material fulfilment.

That is why states require statesmen to articulate, balance and realise multiple aspirations, diverse needs and conflicting demands. And no academy or institution, so far, can claim to create statesmen. It is the collective wisdom that gives birth and nurtures a statesman who is not interchangeable with a manager.

Once again a presidential and a technocrat system is presented as panacea for all the social, political and economic ills by a certain mindset as nascent divine formula. They forget the country, after independence, took off with a centralised, a notch above, presidential system with the post of the governor general invested with vicegeral powers.

Ayub’s martial law formalised and legitimised it with the so-called Basic Democracy, that became the bedrock of political cronyism, patronage and corruption in return for fake legitimacy. The ultimate cost of a centralised system was paid in the form of dismemberment in 1971.

Despite the bruises to the federation, it was the parliamentary system that gave the country a consensus based constitution after 35 years of independence. Generals Ziaul Haq and Musharraf also resurrected the de-facto presidential system by defacing the constitution to cut to size the powers of the parliament by inserting dictatorial amendments.

If centralisation and technocracy were the instrument of stability, integration, development and prosperity, Pakistan should have been a model state by now.

Moreover, if generals and bureaucrats fall into the category of technocrats, then from Ghulam Mohammad, Iskandar Mirza, Ayub Khan to Musharraf, all were technocrats and who had reached the peak of their career on merit. As per this logic, Pakistan should have bulged with their wonders of transparency, development and prosperity.

Lack of transparency, legitimacy and accountability gives birth to corruption. So far, Pakistan witnessed four illegitimate regimes as a result of martial laws or coups d’ tat with each requiring legal and political legitimacy. The former was provided by the judiciary and the latter by ‘incubated’ political cronies in lieu of power crumbs.

The professor must know by his experience as part of a dictator’s regime of what the cost is for buying legitimacy which is a licence for corruption. Same is the case for manipulating perceptions, tailoring opinions and engineering elections to install docile dispensations.

In Pakistan feudalism is a proxy variable of power in the hand of the deep state that can accept anything but not civilian power. Allow two consecutive free and fair elections, without machination and manipulation by the deep state where people can use their unprompted wisdom, the professor will see the fate of the corrupt and the feudal.

It is not the parliamentary system that provides oxygen to feudalism but the power who want to rule behind the scene without responsibility and accountability. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru succeeded to carry out land reforms because he was not answerable to a governor general or any other general, but to the people of India. The day we succeed to make our parliament and prime minister strong enough to be answerable only to the will of the people and not to the whims of baton wielders, that will be a day of prosperity and glory.

Education, no doubt, is a prerequisite to progress and development but what kind of education are we propagating and what is its purpose? Our education system is designed to preserve and propagate a certain mindset in the name of ideology and to hate and annihilate our enemies and neighbours. That works well to preserve our ideology! The professor should inform us whether Korea’s, Singapore’s or Finland teach their students chemistry with lens of theocracy. And whether only those laws and principles of chemistry are acceptable which are compatible with the tenets of their respective religions.

To make the educational system a vehicle of progress and development will need a change in the syllabi and curricula, but in the present environment, who can dare? The parliament inadvertently changed the terminology of an affidavit that Muslim members of parliament needed to submit to solemnise their faith in the finality of prophethood. It resulted in the entire elected government and its law minster running for their lives.

At the moment, the federal capital is paralysed for more than two weeks and by now it is an open secret the power behind is only thirsting for an elected government’s blood.

While sitting in a bunker, the professor talks of progress and development. He must know that a bunker is composed of twofold purpose: to attack the enemy and protect from counter attack. For progress, development and a decent civilised life, we need to change the state paradigm to welfare and not the political system from parliamentary to presidential.

John Hobbes tried to justify the absolute ruler as sine qua non of peace and development but Rousseau manacled the ‘absolute’ with ‘General Will’. Rousseau preferred ‘general will’ over poverty as stated in his prophetic declaration, “… give us back ignorance, innocence and poverty, which alone can make us happy…” Dictatorship, in the guise of stability, progress and development, is not acceptable, at any cost!

The writer is a political analyst hailing from Swat. Tweets @MirSwat

Published in Daily Times, November 23^rd 2017.