The favourite pastime of the chattering classes in Pakistan is blaming
corruption for all the ills in our society. It is not poverty.
Not illiteracy either. It is not terrorism or regional peace or climate
change or scarcity of water. Neither is it over-population and unemployment.
The discourse becomes exceptionally heated when charges of corruption – real or
imaginary – are heaped at civilian politicians. It is not fashionable to
discuss the corruption associated with the Holy Cows, the military and
judiciary. Even the laws prohibit any investigation against them. Several
civilian governments have been dismissed and the politicians hounded for life
by the military and judiciary on charges of corruption.
Intense
debates on the media, anti-corruption campaigns and establishment of bodies to
curb corruption have all failed to produce results. Corruption is skyrocketing
in all spheres of public life and has increased over time by all accounts.
Surprisingly, undeterred by the false propaganda machine, the public at large
considers unemployment and inflation to be far bigger issues than corruption as
per multiple opinion surveys.
Motivated
by narrow vested interests in the context of civil-military rivalry, the
permanent establishment has been able to propagate a superficial false
narrative, which tries to camouflage systematic institutionalised corruption in
the State by focusing on the individual acts of certain individuals and a class
of people, which often happens to be politicians. This simplistic narrative has
consumed the civilian elites, with support from a sizeable chunk of the
upper-middle-class, so much that they fail to see the systematic corrupt
practices deeply rooted in the structure of the post-colonial state.
These
elites have mostly flourished during the British Raj through loot and plunder
of public resources, appointments in colonial administration, issuance of
preferred trade licenses and grant of land to colonial loyalists. Unlike India,
the areas comprising Pakistan had a relatively weak industrial base. Muslim
League was dominated by feudal interests and instead of developing and
strengthening parliamentary democracy and focusing on industrialisation and
ending feudalism, it soon gave up power to a corrupt overdeveloped
post-colonial administrative structure dominated by civil and military
bureaucrats.
The
military and civil bureaucracy, that had excelled in serving their colonial
masters, did not take much time to establish themselves as the sole arbiters of
the distribution of national wealth. Subsequent martial
laws
saw the military occupying all important positions in the state and even the
civil bureaucracy was relegated to a subordinated position. Things did not
change much after the departure of the British rulers. The disdain and contempt
for ordinary citizens and their political representatives was equally prevalent
after partition.
As a
reciprocity to the landed elites relinquishing power to the bureaucracy, large
landholdings were kept untouched without any real land reforms as witnessed in
neighboring India.
The
Pakistani elite’s obsession and fascination with dictators and dictatorial
regimes is rooted in that early period of independence. While the world had
moved on the democratic path in the quest for knowledge, inventions in science
and technology, rapid industrialisation, focus on health and education and
resultant prosperity of their people, we remained stuck with archaic ideologies
glorifying dictators and practicing religious bigotry to keep the masses
ignorant.
Since
time immemorial, like other parts of the world, India has witnessed the
appropriation of communal lands and its transfer to the ruling classes over the
centuries through coercion, intrigues, naked power and wars. From Rajas and
Maharajas and their nobility to the Mughal rulers and their Jagirdars to the
Zamindars under British rule, land was granted to a tiny elite for various
services provided by them to the rulers. These services included recruiting
soldiers for the army, provision of labour for irrigation canals and other
public works and collection of revenue for the rulers. Grant of land ownership
rights had remained a principal instrument for corrupting and manufacturing
elites, who betrayed their own people and communities to protect the interests
of the ruling classes.
It
should not come as a surprise that land has remained a central plank in the
genesis and roots of corruption in Pakistan’s early history and the period
preceding it. The plunder in a real sense started with the grabbing and
allocation of evacuee rural and urban properties left by the migrating Hindu
and Sikh communities soon after Partition to the refugees coming from India on
the basis of property claims that were left behind in India by them. The use of
money and influence in accepting both real and fictitious claims by bureaucrats
and Muslim League politicians is a well-known and documented fact, and remains
the biggest scam in the history of Pakistan.