1.
First, a longish prologue about Pakistan’s problems to which there is no resolution. Not because solutions are unavailable – they are and are not rocket science – but because the desire and the capacity to implement them are missing. And the absence of desire obviates the necessity to invest in capacity leading to further erosion of the latter to the point that it is now non-existent.
Sure, there are some very bright people around but they can never be enough. I am mind-boggled how Bedil (1642-1720), a poet who lived over 300 years ago, could have such a profound understanding of what it takes to overcome the darkness of ignorance, something to which our rulers are still oblivious thinking they can get by with prayers and miracles. Rather than go to China to seek knowledge as directed, our good and obedient Muslims believe they can prosper by begging for some yuans instead.
Read carefully. Here is what Bedil said (translated and explained in a lovely collection by Dr Syed Naeem Hamid Ali al Hamid):
چراغِ برقِ تحقیقی ، نمی باشد درین وادی
سیاهی کرد این جا ، گر همه خورشید پیدا شد
نہیں ہے جب چراغِ برقِ تحقیق اس زمانے میں]
[اندھیرا ہی رہے گا لاکھ ہوں شمس و قمر پیدا
(Without the lamp of research in this valley,
ignorance will not be dispelled no matter how many suns are born)
2.
What we have are too many cooks in the scullery (they refer to each other as crooks much as the British aristocracy enunciates ‘off’ as ‘orff’) engaged, instead of cooking, in stabbing each other in the back or pulling them down by their legs while trying to sleep their way up to the kitchen.
[Digression: In an international bid for a five-kilo basket of quality crabs, Pakistan won with the lowest quote. On inquiry, the tipping margin was the missing lid on the Pakistani basket. Asked to explain, the Pakistanis proudly affirmed they didn’t need a lid – whenever one of their crabs tried to rise, another would pull it down by its legs.]
And what can one say of the above-mentioned bright suns. Once in a while, when a c(r)ook gets trumped out of one of the moulding kitchen cabinets, it is astounding to see him or her turn into a fount of wisdom knowing everything that needs be done to produce a gourmet meal, and one bows down to pray with Ghalib:
رکھیو یا رب یہ درِ گنجینۂ گوہر کھلا
(Lord, please keep open this door of the treasury of pearls)
Alas, as soon as they find a way to squirm themselves back into the kitchen the door is firmly shut and it as if they had never in their lives known what they were pronouncing so recently from the rooftops of leading institutions. Quite an ironic reversal to where Ghalib had expected the outpouring of pearls to occur:
بزمِ شاہنشاہ میں اشعار کا دفتر کھلا
(In the king’s gathering a register of verses opened)
Gone are those days. Now mums the word in the king’s gathering. Not just that, the O-so-recent champions of enlightened advice take on, with unseemly alacrity, the task of strangling any further loose talk. Even as this is being written, a flurry of actions suggests someone having received an approving nod to criminalise criticism of those who have themselves admitted foul play. One has to heed Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911-1984) and say what needs be said before the already-narrow window closes altogether.
بول، یہ تھوڑا وقت بہت ہے
جسم و زباں کی موت سے پہلے
بول، کہ سچ زندہ ہے اب تک
بول، جو کچھ کہنا ہے کہہ لے
(Time enough is this brief hour
Until body and tongue lie dead;
Speak, for truth is living yet –
Speak whatever must be said.)
[Translation: Victor Kiernan]
3.
We began with a claim of the absence of desire. It remains not to substantiate something obvious to the naked eye (the word being used under advisement in a land where everything would rather be veiled), but to explain why that is the case. It is because none of Pakistan’s leaders are rooted in its soil the way they are in normal countries. Prime ministers, ministers and advisors fly in from London, New York and Dubai and fly back when they are trumped out. Others decamp as soon as they retire, often with planeloads of toshakhana gifts, to villas in the UAE, ranches in Texas or farms in Australia. Their energies are devoted to extracting as much as possible as long as they can before the boat capsizes. Perhaps the loot is needed to buy permanent residence in their safe havens. How else to explain the ease with which they, some with criminal charges against their names, are permitted to settle abroad in places where ordinary folks have to wait more than a year to just be interviewed for a visa? People whose own survival is not at stake need not distract themselves with the desire to fix anything.
4.
Given the above, I am not really bothered by those who insist on the delivery of a “solution” to Pakistan’s problems. There are many others doing that and I am more interested in diagnosis than in prescription. As a matter of fact, I find it quite odd that the complainers do not question the point of offering advice to those they simultaneously accuse of never following it. For that it is sufficient to refer them to the poet Mir Taqi Mir (1723-1810):
میر کیا سادے ہیں بیمار ہوئے جس کے سبب
اسی عطّار کے لڑکے سے دوا لیتے ہیں
(Mir is so simple, he is seeking a cure
from the same perfumer’s lad who gave him the disease)
5.
Be that as it may, I have often wondered if I would be able to conjure up a solution if a gun were held to my head. For long I thought I wouldn’t be able to save my life till the glimmer of a possibility appeared from silly mid-on. It was courtesy of the newly-selected chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board who immediately sacked all local coaches and selectors and insisted the solution to Pakistan’s cricketing woes was a man named Mickey Arthur and some others, all foreigners, because a foreigner is “willing to make no compromises in team interest."
I did have a nagging reservation because it’s no secret that past chairmen and patrons have also made compromises similar to those of local coaches and selectors or have allowed the latter to do so under their watch when it suited their interests. Far be it for me to take the mickey out of the chairman, it being polite convention to exempt present company, but I felt the logic of his sound argument ought naturally to percolate upwards.
Still and all, given the paucity of alternatives, I convinced myself I should push the Chairman’s logic as far as was possible and see whether it would leave us in better shape than we are in now. I felt it was worth exploring the Mickey Arthur solution especially given that politics and economics should have higher priority than cricket although, it must be immediately conceded, one can never be too sure in Pakistan. The extent of attention devoted by the Prime Minister, as patron, to fix cricket while the country was falling apart, does call into question any presumptions relying on mere rationality.
6.
The point remains that no matter how much we love them, the locals in charge of economics and politics are not up to scratch; they are leading us over the edge and there won’t be room enough for the plebs on the helicopter when they lift off. Faiz may well have had them in mind when he said:
تیرے ہونٹوں کے پھولوں کی چاہت میں ہم
دار کی خشک ٹہنی پہ وارے گئے
(Longing for your lips, dreaming of their blossoms
We were hung from the dry branch of the scaffold)
[The following lines of a popular song from the movie Woh Chaand Khila (1959) might help at this point.]
سمجھنے والے سمجھ گئے ہیں
نہ سمجھیں ۰ وہ اناڑی ہیں
(Those who understand have understood
Those who don’t are but amateurs)
To repeat: The situation is dire and the executioner is tightening the noose. It is not that solutions are too complex; it is just that the ability to execute is non-existent given decades of erosion of human capital via mind-numbing school curricula and various hybrid experiments seeking the most self-seeking, servile, and pliant proxies to govern the country.
In such a situation, the Mickey Arthur solution would be to bring in on one- to two-year contracts foreign consultants who are qualified, competent, unbiased and have hands-on experience. More importantly, they must have a feel for the toxic local culture that is a minefield for the unwary. Pakistanis with memory would recall the poor chap who was brought in from Lufthansa to run the fast sinking national airline and was instead conned within no time into a Houdini-like disappearance of a plane.
The critical financial situation threatening to unravel the economy calls for sophisticated debt restructuring via negotiations with both private lenders and multilateral agencies like the IMF and the World Bank. There is simply no one more qualified for this task than Avinash Persaud who as Special Envoy to the Prime Minister was central to a similar restructuring in Barbados and is also a global leader through the celebrated Bridgetown Initiative in linking climate financing with conditionalities of debt repayment. Readers can convince themselves by reading any of the host of news reports about his credentials.
The State Bank needs a very experienced hand at the helm and for that I would turn to Raghuram Rajan. For economic policy, I would tap Arvind Subramaniam. And for crafting a vision for the future, I would rely on Kaushik Basu who, after Karl Polanyi, is among the few economists who understand how the economy is embedded in society and how asymmetrical relationships of power shape economic outcomes.
[Digression: It was while teaching students the relationship between the economy and society that I realised how times had changed with society now increasingly embedded in the economy. The Pakistan cricket team was in the West Indies at the time and we are all struck by the fact that they were playing all through the month of Ramzan. The point was driven home when play continued on the day of Eid itself. Gone were the days when Sunday was a day of rest during five-day matches. Now, match fee and TV revenues trump devotion and one prays in one’s spare time.]
7.
Given that this is Pakistan, there is little chance the experts recommended would be welcome and my intention in naming them is only for readers to look them up and see the huge difference between the capabilities available outside and those with which we are attempting to address our problems. This is a difference that cannot be bridged in decades given what is being taught in our schools and colleges.
Prejudice in our society is so entrenched that we even shun the little talent we have available. At a recent conference on tolerance in Pakistan at a prestigious university, intended to highlight the life of minorities, one representative was disinvited at the last minute leaving his seat unoccupied. It is actually preposterous to think that individuals of such calibre can be biassed. As the chairman of the PCB has said of Mickey Arthur and others he plans to add: “a foreigner does not bring excess baggage.” Such consultants would more likely look upon the assignment as a personal challenge to demonstrate their skills in reviving a near comatose patient.
8.
One final problem remains: What is to be done with those who would be telling the consultants what to do and responsible for implementing what they are advised? If the present lot is not scary enough, the next generation of Rajapaksas is positively frightening. My ‘solution’ is not intended to be taken seriously but now that I have entered candyland let me push the fantasy to its limit.
It would be nice to imagine a scenario where the entire ruling group could be given a golden handshake much like employees of bloated public sector organisations. They could continue to draw their salaries; the savings in efficiency from their staying away would outweigh manifold the payments to keep them engaged in playing golf on their exclusive courses or relocate to their villas, ranches and farms abroad from where they would be free to visit for the occasional wedding or funeral.
Instead, each province (plus AJK and GB there being no reason to deprive them of the benefits) would be outsourced to a country that has demonstrated it knows how to govern its economy and society. This would be a scaling-up of the model so successfully innovated by Pandit Nehru when he founded the set of IITs in India in the 1950s. Each one was run by a different foreign group who competed to demonstrate the prowess of their model. As a result, the institutions attained international prominence and are considered hugely successful in contributing to the outsized presence of Indians in the world of technology.
[Caveat: The IITs haven’t contributed much to Indian society itself but that is another story partly detailed in the previous post. For more on why that might be the case, one could read Ashoka Mody’s India Is Broken: A People Betrayed, Independence to Today (2023).]
In choosing whom to outsource the governance and management of Pakistan’s provinces one would do well to avoid the big powers that have a nasty habit of using such interventions to advance their own global interests. Countries with smaller global footprints but with successful track records would make for better choices and there are many to choose from – Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Netherlands, Finland and Sweden, for example. Five years of free reign for any of them would turn Pakistan around.
9.
This is a fairy tale, of course, and none of this would ever come to pass which is why I began with the claim that there is no resolution to Pakistan’s problems. The Rajapaksa orchestra under the baton of a pious conductor-in-chief on deck with various other off-pitch c(r)ooks in the pit will play on while water fills the holds from below. After that, who knows.
10.
پاک سرزمین شاد باد
کشورِ حسین شاد باد
تُو نشانِ عزمِ عالی شان
ارضِ پاکستان!
مرکزِ یقین شاد باد
پاک سرزمین کا نظام
قُوَّتِ اُخوَّتِ عوام
قوم، ملک، سلطنت
پائندہ تابندہ باد!
شاد باد منزلِ مراد
پرچمِ ستارہ و ہِلال
رہبرِ ترقِّی و کمال
ترجمانِ ماضی، شانِ حال
جانِ استقبال!
سایۂ خدائے ذوالجلال
(Blessed be the sacred land,
Happy be the bounteous realm.
Thou symbol of high resolve,
O Land of Pakistan!
Blessed be the citadel of faith.
The order of this sacred land,
The might of the brotherhood of the people,
May the nation, the country, and the state,
Shine in glory everlasting!
Blessed be the goal of our ambition.
The flag of the crescent and star,
Leads the way to progress and perfection,
Interpreter of our past, glory of our present,
inspiration for our future!
Shade of God, the Glorious and Mighty.)
What one likes about Anjum Altaf is that almost everything he writes is original and a piece of exquisite creativity. Almost all panel writers in the mainstream English newspapers in Pakistan have this habit of reproducing what is already known with just a paragraph or two as new. But Anjum Altaf is always new from beginning to end which makes a reader following him with interest.