“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves…”
(Shakespeare, in Julius Caesar)
In a comprehensive report, based on field research, the IMF has quantified the deleterious impact of corruption on Pakistan’s economy.
The report states:
“Corruption is a persistent challenge in Pakistan, with significant adverse implications for economic development. Indicators reflect weak control of corruption over time with negative consequences for public spending effectiveness, revenue collection, and trust in the legal system. While corruption vulnerabilities are present at all levels of government, the most economically damaging manifestations involve privileged entities that exert influence over key economic sectors, including those owned by or affiliated with the state.”
It concludes:
“Pakistan would obtain substantial economic benefits from improving governance, accountability, and integrity along the lines recommended in this report. Based on cross-country analysis of the reform experience of emerging markets, IMF analysis projects that Pakistan could generate between a 5 to 6.5 percent increase in GDP by implementing a package of governance reforms over the course of 5 years.”
A qualifier worth noting is that the report only focuses on corruption at the federal level, and not at the provincial or inter-provincial levels. If corruption was quantified at all levels, the impact would be much greater.
Of course, corruption is only one of the evils that Jinnah cautioned against. He cautioned the people to refrain from “bribery and corruption,” “black-marketing” and “nepotism and jobbery.” He also asked them to refrain from bigotry, sectarianism and any other forces that divide people.
He laid out the ground rules with which to live their lives not just once but multiple times during the one year that he ruled the country as Governor General.
Just three days before independence, on 11 August 1947, while delivering the presidential address to the Constituent Assembly, he congratulated everyone who was involved in Pakistan’s creation, calling it a titanic event. Then he went on to say that the sovereign body’s task, first and foremost, was to frame a constitution. Sadly, the members of the assembly kept on squabbling for nine long years before approving the Constitution on 29 February 1956.
The IMF report only focuses on corruption at the federal level. If corruption was quantified at all levels, the impact would be much greater
By contrast, India’s Constitution was approved in just two years, on 26 November 1949. It went into effect on 26 January 1950. That speaks volumes since India is much larger than Pakistan and culturally and historically much more diverse than Pakistan.
Jinnah went on to say that the government was duty-bound to maintain law and order. To do that, it would have to rid the nation of “bribery and corruption,” “black-marketing” and “nepotism and jobbery.” Sadly, the governments that succeeded failed to do so. The three evils he talked about spread like cancer in the body politic of the country. They are now endemic in the culture of the country.
And then Jinnah turned to the main theme of his speech, calling upon the people to bury the hatchet that had divided them during the freedom struggle.
Jinnah said every Pakistani was “First, second and last a citizen of this State with equal rights, privileges and obligations.” He reminded them that even among Muslims there were “Pathans, Punjabis, Shias, Sunnis and so on,” and among the Hindus there were “Brahmins, Vashnavas, Khatris … and so on.” These distinctions had to vanish in the political sphere once independence had been achieved if progress was going to be achieved.
Then came those famous lines that reverberate through history: “You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed — that has nothing to do with the business of the State.”
This was a very clear statement that he wanted Pakistan to be a secular republic. In a passage that is often overlooked, Jinnah recalled a time when England was riven with differences between the Roman Catholics and the Protestants, differences much worse than those that prevailed between Muslims and Hindus in India at the time of Partition. He exclaimed, “Thank God, we are not starting [our journey toward nationhood] in those days.” In today’s England, he said, one could say that “Roman Catholics and Protestants do not exist; what exists now is that every man is a citizen, an equal citizen of Great Britain and they are all members of the Nation.”
He closed by saying that if Pakistanis made such a secular state their ideal, they would find that “In course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State.”
Some four months later, on 28 December 1947, Jinnah exhorted the new nation to live by three watchwords: “Unity, faith and discipline.” He said, “You must make up your mind now. We must sink individualism and petty jealousies and make up our minds to serve the people with honesty and faithfulness.”
Jinnah died on 11 September 1948, with the constitution still unframed. The first war with India over Kashmir had consumed most of his energies, and the linguistic tensions stirred by the imposition of Urdu as the national language on the Bengalis in East Pakistan. His successors were unable to bring his vision into reality. Until the army seized power on 27 October 1958, Pakistan had been governed by seven prime ministers while India had been governed only by one, Jawaharlal Nehru.
Furthermore, the framers of Pakistan’s constitution chose to name it The Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the opposite of Jinnah’s vision.
Jinnah had Pakistanis to avoid triggering inter-religious violence between Muslims, Hindus, Christians and Parsis. He also cautioned them against engaging in intra-religious violence among the Muslims. Sadly, the people indulged in both types of violence. Some were burned alive because a mob felt they had committed blasphemy. Some women were buried alive because their male relatives felt they had violated their faith. And then a new type of violence emerged which Jinnah had not mentioned in his speech. This was inter-provincial violence.
The most visible manifestation of this was the putting down of Bengalis living in East Pakistan. Their appearance, their language, and even their appearance was ridiculed by the people living in West Pakistan. Within West Pakistan, the Muslims who had migrated during the Partition were labelled as refugees and treated with scorn.
All these fissures within the body politic came to a head with the secession of East Pakistan in December 1971. In what remained of Pakistan, a minority sect, who followed the teachings of Ghulam Mirza Ahmad, were declared non-Muslims. The first Pakistani to get a Nobel prize, the eminent physicist Dr Abdus Salam was declared a non-Muslim and his tombstone desecrated.
Because of all the troubles that have afflicted Pakistan since independence, Jinnah’s critics have argued that his vision was Utopian. To buttress their case, they argue that Partition unleashed bloodshed on an unprecedented scale. It was not the peaceful conclusion of a long protracted court case but a titanic tragedy.
Jinnah’s supporters argue that the problem was not in his vision but in how it was implemented. Failure on a scale so grand that it befitted a Shakespeare stage was not predestined. Sincere and competent leaders could have averted the blunders in political integration and developed a sense of national identity that did not derive from a fear of being pulled back into the womb.
They could have pursued Jinnah’s constitutional platform as far as it could be taken, not necessarily all the way to the heights it had attained in the West but at least as far as it was taken by the sibling next door. There was a time when India’s fault lines darkened its political horizons even more sharply than they did so in Pakistan.
There was no ‘law of necessity’ that said that civil society in Pakistan would morph into a miasma of internecine warfare between rival religious sects, ethnic groups, provinces, drug lords, common criminals, rich and poor, and ultimately between the military and the civilians.
In my last column, I analysed the role that the military had played in subverting democracy in Pakistan. But it would be too facile to conclude that the fault lies just with the army. It also lies with the politicians who have governed the country during the past 78 years. But ultimately, it must be laid at the foot of the people who elected those politicians in the first place. The people not only tolerated the unwise policies of the politicians but found ways to profit from them by indulging in all the evils that the Quaid cautioned against.