There was great hope in Imran Khan. Three months down the line the contours of the near and intermediate future seem pretty clear i.e as expected, Imran will not steal. He will be decisive. He will have his own foreign policy. He will have a positive attitude to India, but one free of any personal interest. He will get along with the Army much better than any of his predecessors. He will be taken much more seriously by our neighbours as well as the rest of the world than either Zardari or Nawaz Sharif were. But sadly, he too will be surrounded by the same muck and rot which seems to have risen to the top in most segments of our society and most of our institutions. Often, he himself will be responsible for this himself.
So far Imran has managed to create economic breathing space for Pakistan. And by opening the Kartarpur corridor he has sent Indian leadership and media in a perpetual wail like dogs howling at the full moon on a cold night!
But a couple of days back the dollar jumped, and Pakistan sank, while cost of living daily breaks the backs of the poor, all the time adding new numbers to their wretched ranks.
And let there be no doubt that the Rupee will continue to fall, while prices will continue to rise. Next year by this time they could be double what they are today, and the year after, four times as much. There is not too much time left before people come out on the streets, and serious rioting begins. By this time tons made in illicit wealth will have organized itself and will be deployed against the state to save the dacoits. And all will be done to have the government brought down. Let no one harbour any doubts about this.
If you keep a diary, write this down.
The only way to avert this scenario is to retrieve looted wealth and bring about good governance.
Any hope of good governance has been lost in the multiple confusions of the government. If the flag of hope is still flying, it is doing so only because of the actions of the Supreme Court, which has become the sole repository of hope in the land.
Even if government confusion were to abate, good governance will remain a pipe dream, because the capacity of the institutions to bring this about has been destroyed. There is not enough time to rebuild this capacity. The only option therefore is to throw the rot out and bring in people of ability and integrity from retirement.
But this alone won’t go very far unless Pakistan also retrieves its looted wealth to extend its breathing space to a point where Pakistan’s economy can be turned around. But two flaws, both immediately correctable, stand against this:
- No government institution, including NAB [assuming that the latter at long last is willing to stand up for the law, rather than assist in breaking it] have the capacity to investigate the most notorious cases of massive theft. And though some outstanding police officers who have this ability are in retirement and can be brought in for this purpose, the government’s imagination seems too restricted to even examine this possibility.
- Though our looted wealth is parked all over the world, many of those who stole it from Pakistan are still in the country. Instead of treating them like VIPs, a little bit of tough love from your average Thanedar is guaranteed to produce very large piles of gold. But the policy of the government seems to be to mollycoddle the thieves!
But how could such plunder take place that could have destroyed the state had the brigands not been thrown out in the nick of time?
This road to perdition began when Musharraf started off with the promise of accountability, created NAB, but then made it an instrument of selective harassment when he decided to give immunity to the Chaudhrys of Gujrat, so that he could ride to political glory on their puny shoulders.
Amon a whole range of other crimes, his NRO formally legitimated plunder of national assets.
For ten years beginning 2008 it was open season on Pakistan’s treasury. This was known to us all. But it is only when the PTI government came to power, that we got to know the sheer scale of theft that Pakistan was subjected to, the huge numbers of people involved, and the intricacies of the schemes employed to denude and bankrupt the state. This was certainly motivated by insatiable greed. But the sheer heartlessness of it also points to a strange sort of malice–such malice that can only be nurtured by animus. An animus akin to treason.
The people who have brought Pakistan to its present state of want and penury and bartered away its future, have also stolen its sovereignty. They need to be tried and put away both for plunder and for treason against the state.
Pakistan’s financial bankruptcy in tandem with a tottering economy still remains the single most important national security issue of the day. This accursed journey took ten years of unrestrained plunder and outright treachery to reach the present pass. With no person or institution standing in the way of those responsible for this mayhem on the state, the only institution that could have saved the day was that which had the de facto charge of national security. There were two Army Chiefs who spanned this decade of infamy. Kiyani and Raheel Sharif.
They could have taken notice of where the state was headed, and knocked at the doors of the Supreme Court to stay the slide of Pakistan into the abyss. But they chose to look away. One is obviously left to wonder what definitions of national security are these guys taught at their staff and war colleges! And will mega corruption ever form part of national security imperatives which is the crying need of the times!
If Pakistan is to recover and get its full sovereignty back, it will have to retrieve its stolen assets. This can only be done if the government has the resolve and the clarity to do this. At present both seem to be lacking.
As a first step the criminals who are responsible for the dire straits they have brought Pakistan to, will have to be treated as the criminals they are. They need to be treated exactly as the Jail Manual mandates such treatment. They should wear and sleep and eat and shit as our “lesser” criminals do. But thus far it seems the aim is to treat them to a picnic. The working theory seems to be “the bigger the crime, the softer the treatment!”
If you give five-star treatment to heartless criminals who had no compunction raping their motherland and expect them to give back stolen wealth, you must be soft in the head!
And where is the ECL? Why were Shahbaz’s son and son in law and hundreds of others like them, who were persons of interest, allowed to fly out of Pakistan? This is what thousands of people want to ask of their Prime Minister. Who is sleeping at the wheel?
But supposing, by some miracle, the looted wealth is retrieved, will Imran then be able to turn Pakistan around, beyond the breathing space he has been able to give it for the present?
A steadily increasing group of people think there will be no such turnaround because, they believe, Imran lacks the competence to do so. In their view at the very least governance should have improved. This does not take money to achieve. It just takes the ability to judge people and to place the best of them in the right slots, and good governance would automatically result.
But this, they say, has not happened. And it has not happened because Imran did not understand the complete ramifications of the plunder that the state was subjected to; that it was not just money that was lost, but that the institutions were also destroyed. And this destroyed capacity. Not just the capacity for good governance, but also the capacity of these institutions to be rejuvenated without extraneous resources being brought in. It was not just that civil servants and police officers were corrupted and politicized in large numbers, but that their ethos and work ethic was destroyed. Over ten years it became an ingrained part of their culture that an officer works not for the state, but as a personal servant to his masters. To put this situation right not only did Imran need to put hundreds of such officers out to pasture, but it was vital that he filled the vacated ranks with uncontaminated officers, even if they were to be brought in from the ranks of the retired.
Instead of doing this, Imran has given prize postings to many of those about whose disloyalty to the state, and lack of integrity, there is absolutely no doubt. Just one of hundreds of such examples is that of Ali Jehangir Siddiqui. Why, many would like to know, given his reputation, was this man allowed to remain so long as ambassador to the U.S?
But Imran has done worse. His government has treated officers of known honesty and integrity like dirt. Examples of this which are freely being quoted are those of IG Nasir Durrani [his own poster boy from KPK], DIG Suhail Tajik, the police officers who spearheaded the commendable anti qabza group drive in Lahore, and most recently the case of Hussain Asghar [recently DG anti-corruption Lahore] who was kicked upstairs for having the temerity to proceed against Malik Riaz Hussain and some favourites of the government–both civil servants and politicians. And there are other examples.
These examples are very difficult to refute. Not only are outstanding officers being wasted in a situation where they are badly needed, but they are being insulted by the treatment meted out to them. This is becoming the hallmark of the government.
But a steadily shrinking core group of Imran’s supporters have their own take on this situation i.e that Imran is a hostage to corrupt elements of his own party, the bureaucracy, the police, as well as many who are partners in coalition with PTI. And sadly, the army as well. It is said he understands these issues, but his hands are bound, so that he cannot rectify the problems. He is in fact like someone who wants to prohibit fornication in a brothel but is only too aware that should he proceed with this, all the whores and pimps will gang up and bundle him out.
And this latter take seems eminently plausible with Imran Khan trying to balance himself between politicians hungry to carve out spheres of power, and bureaucrats he cannot abide nor do without.
And here lies the crux of the problem. True, massive unhindered corruption is what has brought the state to its knees so that its very sovereignty is more a matter of debate today, than reality.
But what is it that drove this corruption? Of course, corruption is a part of any society, but what is it that determined its scale and sheer heartlessness in ours? Was this not our “Return on Investment” brand of democracy in which plunder lies embedded? A “democracy” in which one must first invest crores of rupees in order to win a seat in parliament, and having got there, then get to making profit on the investment already made? Is this not the primal sin?
Thus, how can a system which is rooted in expectation of theft not luxuriate in corruption? How can rule of law even have a hope to survive in a system founded on the flouting of the law?
What can be done about this is another debate, but my concern is with the present. And I see no way out of this mire, except imposition of a national emergency and putting together a national government to run the affairs of state till all the looted wealth is returned to the state, and a thorough restructuring, cleansing, and depoliticization of infected institutions is completed.
For this soft revolution to play out its course it is vital for the sake of stability that the service ages of all the Justices of the Supreme Court be extended by three years, and there should be similar extension in the tenure of the army chief–better to go with tried horses than ones unknown.
Every constitution foresees circumstances in which a state or part thereof is overwhelmed by forces which disallow normal governance. Times like these are remedied by resort to rule by emergency. Never in the history of Pakistan was emergency rule such a dire requirement as it is today. The more we wait, the worse the situation will become.
The choice is stark. It is a choice between having corrective surgery done today, or burying a rotten lice ridden corpse tomorrow.
And that will be the corpse of the state if looted wealth is now given a chance to organize and deploy itself to bail out the dacoits at the cost of the state.