THE Economist generally takes a dim view of every political situation in Pakistan and even dimmer of the ability of its leaders to put it right. One rarely finds an occasion to disagree with this venerable London journal.
Its comment on the emerging electoral alliances and on the selection of the new prime minister has, however, furnished such an occasion.
Asif Zardari, says the journal, has chosen to nominate “a nondescript feudal landlord” Yusuf Raza Gilani as prime minister in the expectation that he would gamely make way for Mr Zardari after he wins a by-election and, simultaneously, had given a sop to the powerful Punjab province.
The Economist has got it wrong on every count. Mr Gilani may not have much to recommend himself but in Pakistan’s hereditary politics hardly anyone does. Jinnah, some of his deputies and the latter-day Ayub Khan, Zulfikar and Benazir Bhutto were exceptions. Now, at least Gilani’s lineage goes back to the imperial legislative council.
Then Gilani’s appointment is no sop to Punjab. In fact the first and chief contender for the job, Makhdoom Amin Fahim, would have perhaps been more welcome there. Maybe Zardari preferred Gilani for being more amenable to his direction than Fahim but one is inclined to trust Asif when he says he has no intention to be prime minister and Gilani would be there for the full five years.
In sharing power with other parties and keeping himself out, Asif is being more clever than generous. He can foresee, as many among us do, that it would be more a sharing of blame as law and order and the economy deteriorate while crime and food prices keep rising.
Cynical comments and gloomy prospects aside, the paucity of enlightened leadership arising from the contemporary social milieu should be a cause of worry. The country has no one to look up to but the old landed gentry and some new rich whose second home is London or Dubai. It is a great irony that all the three contenders for the prime ministerial job hail from a party of workers and peasants that promises ‘all power to the people’. They are not just the country barons, they have the halo of saints as well.
The alternative is the scattered and rowdy political forces of sectarian or ethnic outlook which mercifully people reject at the polls. But still they keep ruling the streets as the elected elite has hangers-on aplenty but no street fighters. The democratic system thus lacks stability even when the elections are fair and the army does not intervene. Now a shaken judiciary and restive Frontier tribes are likely to make it even more unstable.
The prime minister may not be nondescript but his newly inducted policy thinkers and speech writers surely are. In his maiden address they made him say too much signifying too little. The small farmer would not believe that his crops would ever be insured nor the people expect that the government would find a solution for Kashmir where others couldn’t.
A little more needs to be said about the prime minister’s promise of a new package for the tribal areas and repeal of the Frontier Crimes Regulation. Whatever the contents of the forthcoming package, repeal of the FCR has been rejected outright by tribal elders and the clerics have gleefully demanded enforcement of Sharia to fill the void. The issue is now before a committee. Denied the applause, the prime minister now has the time to contemplate and consult.
The infamous FCR, as Mr Gilani chose to describe it, was enacted in 1872 when the tribal areas were not administered at all and the districts of Dera Ismail Khan, Bannu, Kohat, Peshawar and Hazara formed part of the Punjab province. It was towards the end of the 19th century that Lord Curzon undertook to consolidate the imperial frontier and organised the tribal areas into five agencies — South Waziristan, North Waziristan, Kurram, Khyber and Malakand. Along with the five districts separated from Punjab, they were placed under a chief commissioner at Peshawar which decades later became the North-West Frontier Province.
The FCR is still the law applicable to the agencies now numbering seven but it is really tradition and necessity that determines where the authority of the political agent ends and autonomy of the tribes begins. The degree varied from agency to agency but was respected till the liberators of Afghanistan, now its terrorists, arrived on the scene with their bombs.
The tribal areas have historically been administered by men — the political agent on one side and elders on the other — and not by laws. And that is how it should be even now. The political agent then was backed by his own levies and paramilitary scouts raised from the tribes but commanded by army officers. Now that the terrorists have eroded the influence of the elders and the government itself has undermined the prestige of the political agent, the established arrangement has been disturbed. Repeal of the FCR is inconsequential to the situation.
So complete was the authority of the political agent in colonial times that once Sir John Lawrence grumbled that he had to write to Fredrich Mackeson five times before he could get an answer from him. At the same time Lawrence acknowledged that “no man appreciated Mackeson’s high qualities more than I did — but he let everything else go in order to cultivate the friendship of the tribesmen”. No doubt the tribesmen called Mackeson ‘Kishen Kaka’ and so remembered him long after he was dead.
After independence too the political agents drawn from the civil service administered the tribes relying not on the laws but on their skill and goodwill of the elders. The government hardly ever interfered. At best they sought the commissioner’s advice and some time had to suffer his admonition. The times indeed have changed but many among them (Roedad Khan, Ijlal Hyder Zaidi, Jamil Ahmad, to name just three residing in Islamabad) still could be called upon to advise. Not to be forgotten is the once gutsy scout commander, Naseerullah Babar.
This writer does not count himself in that league but can truthfully state that in the six years that he divided between the Mohmands and Chitral as political agent at the beginning of his career not once did he feel it necessary to invoke the ‘dreaded’ FCR. In Chitral, the Sharia and the customary laws operated alongside the FCR. This writer had to preside over the council of elders of all three but never was bias even alleged leave alone oppression.
When the so-called democratic experiments do not work, one must hark back to colonial remedies that worked and made the Frontier a legend. The first step in that direction should be to group the districts and agencies together under three commissioners who should be reporting to the provincial and not the federal government.
But when all has been said, my friend and former police IG Arbab Hedayatullah, who now lives on the edge of the tribal area, strikes a despondent note. The mullah, he says, has replaced the malik all over. The political agent thus has become irrelevant. Now only the army can tame the child it once fathered.
Courtesy: Daily Dawn, 6/4/2008
Loading ...
Recent Comments