Governance Challenges

Chronic instability and an oligarchic-dominated political order impeded the evolution of modern governance.

Patronage-based politics practiced by democratic and military governments alike relied on working networks of influential political families, clans or kinship groups (biradaries) to maintain themselves in power.

But this mode of governance failed to meet the needs of an increasingly complex society.

Governance challenges intensified with a force and intensity that derived from a complex interplay between internal and external factors:

1. The blowback from the country’s protracted Cold War engagements and the impact of great power rivalries and global geo-politics.

Few countries have had to face the headwinds blowing from their location as Pakistan.

If the tyranny of geography imposed heavy burdens the myopic policies pursued by successive governments exacerbated the situation.

The fallout of the two Afghan wars (in the 1980s and that following the US-led military intervention in 2001) was not of Pakistan’s making.

But its destabilising consequences were poorly anticipated and ineptly managed by ruling elites interested more in short-term goals and self-preservation than in protecting their society.

2. Pakistan’s troubled relations with India and the ‘unfinished business’ of partition epitomised by the dispute over Kashmir.

Dealing with a hostile India pursuing hegemonic policies drove a perpetual fear of conflict and became an abiding preoccupation for Pakistan’s policy-makers.

This made the goal of security and deterring India (through conventional military means as well as by the acquisition of a nuclear capability) an overwhelming priority.

But there was an inevitable trade-off: the development needs of the country in education, health and other public services could not be adequately addressed. This meant that while the state’s hard power increased, human security deteriorated.

Every missile test Pakistan conducted offered a stunning contrast to the desperate state of its social and physical infrastructure with the literacy deficit and energy shortages representing perilous tips of this iceberg.

3. The economic legacy of the Bhutto years as extensive state intervention in the economy.

The sweeping nationalisation in the 1970s produced:

• too much government
• too little governance for decades to come.

Mismanagement of a vast network of state enterprises became a huge drain on the national exchequer.

It crowded out private investment and sucked scarce resources away from the social sector including education, the bedrock of economic progress.

Privatisation of some enterprises in the 1990s and the Musharraf years helped to reduce but not end this burden.

By 2010, public sector corporations still required huge government subsidies.

• Losses in these enterprises were estimated at $4 billion a year with the haemorrhage in the power sector alone accounting for Rs. 256 billion ($3 billion) in 2010.

Fault Lines in Pakistan’s Polity

Pakistan’s political experience has been shaped by overlapping factors that seem to have become enduring faultlines. The following 5 factors are central to understanding the Pakistan story:

1. The power asymmetry between political and non-political or unelected institutions.

2. A feudal-dominated political order and culture that has fostered clientelist politics.

3. Reliance by an oligarchic elite on ‘borrowed’ growth and bailouts to address the country’s chronic financial crises and its resistance to taxing itself and its network of supporters.

4. The intersection between efforts to ’leverage’ geography in pursuit of national security goals and the role of outside powers.

5. The persistence of centrifugal forces and bitter ideological controversies over the role of Islam in the state and society.

Asymmetry in Power between Political and Non-Political Institutions

The imbalance was rooted as much in the colonial heritage as impelled by the fraught circumstances of a newly established country.

This led to the ‘steel frame’ of civil-military state organs easily establishing their dominance over weak political institutions.

Pakistan’s independence party is the Muslim League. Its Indian counterpart is the Congress Party.

It did not have the advantage of a leader’s stewardship to steer the new nation because Jinnah died so soon after partition.

The leadership of the League came predominantly from India.

• It could not compete with the indigenous political elites without enlisting the support of the civil-military bureaucracy.

The military’s pre-eminence also owed itself to managing the political turmoil that followed partition and the early war with India over Kashmir.

But it was also able to establish itself as the arbiter in a situation marked by political wrangling and fierce conflict between the indigenous and non-indigenous power elites.

The coup of 1958 marked a decisive institutional shift, with non-elected institutions becoming ascendant over the political system.

This was accompanied by the phenomenon of state intervention in the political process, which was witnessed with even greater intensity under Zia and then in the Musharraf era.

This left political forces weak and divided. Long periods of military rule also thwarted the evolution of parties and other political institutions, accentuating this asymmetry. The military’s dominance was also reinforced by the focus on security driven by unrelenting tensions with India.

The primacy of unelected institutions over representative organs left Parliament weak and subservient to the executive. Parliamentary subordination to a powerful executive had its roots in the weak credentials of the legislature in Pakistan’s early years.

With no popularly or directed-elected legislature until the 1970 polls, the assemblies that functioned between 1947 and 1970 were elected by a restricted franchise, which denuded Parliament of real legitimacy and authority.

This also cast the state’s evolving structure into a specific mould, retarding the development of party structures and organisation.

There is, however, an important subtext to this story often obscured by the binary focus on civil-military power asymmetries.

That has to do with the personalised nature of parties and the fact that the major ones resembled not modern organisations but were built around traditional kinship groups and local influentials to effectively become family fiefdoms.

Even today the dynastic character of parties illustrates the primacy of personalism over organisation.

The PPP is led by Benazir Bhutto’s widower and co-chaired by her young son, and the Muslim League is run by the Sharif brothers with the progeny of Shahbaz Sharif being prepared for future leadership.

Even religious parties have not been immune to this.

The Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam is led by Maulana Fazl-ur-Rahman. He:

• inherited this position from his father Mufti Mahmud
• nominated his brother to the coalition cabinet of Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani.

The former Amir of the Jamaat-e-Islami, Qazi Hussain Ahmad ensured that his daughter was awarded a seat reserved for women in the 2002 parliament.

The personalised nature of parties has:

• contributed to their organisational weakness
• deprived them of the dynamism that modern organisations bring to politics including the expertise needed to run a government.

Dynasties have constrained wider participation, as they are the antithesis of modern inclusionary politics.

They have also impeded parties from acquiring institutional autonomy from the whims of the leader.

This has been reinforced by the telling absence of democracy within most parties.*

The major parties are:

• the PPP
• factions of the Muslim League
• the regional Awami National Party

Their leaders are not elected. Instead, they rise by ‘acclamation’. Nor do regular elections determine which occupants hold office at different tiers.

They are usually ‘selected’ by the leader on the basis of their loyalty and ‘connections’.

Musharraf had made changes in the Constitution in order to rebalance the powers between:

• the President
• the Prime Minister
• the centre and the provinces.

The Eighth Constitutional Amendment was adopted by Parliament to do away with those changes.

But in April 2010 the party lawmakers deleted the constitutional obligation to hold party elections from that Amendment.

• This proves the Party leaders’ resistance to internal democracy

The social composition of the military has increasingly become middle or lower middle class.

It has often set itself apart from these traditional political parties as an institution that:

• offers social mobility
• operates on the basis of merit and professionalism.

But when the military forged political alliances to rule, it has turned into the very traditional political force that it calls retrogressive and incompetent.

Expediency has defined its politics just like that of the political class.