The recent astounding electoral victory in Azad Kashmir has come as a shot in the arm for the PML-N and its top leadership. It obviously has had a rejuvenating effect on the party and the prime minister more specifically. The prime minister has, as if, suddenly convalesced from his much publicised heart ailment.
In the post-electoral victory phase, he pretends to be busy taking keen interest in the affairs of the state for which he is known to have little penchant. While seeing the PML-N’s performance and well-coordinated organisation at the constituency level, many analysts feel sure to pronounce yet another term for Sharifs after the 2018 elections.
I think that prediction is not too off the mark. The scam emanating out of Panama Leaks undoubtedly posed a few awkward moments for the Sharif family, but then those moments went by without denting their perceived impregnability. After merely a few weeks, the smears caused by the Panama Leaks were obliterated from the active memory of people. Imran Khan’s shrieking denunciation of rampant corruption and corrupt politicians has gone heedless.
Corruption is not a vice in Pakistan. No one is bothered if corruption in Pakistan is widespread, particularly in the government and lower levels of police force. In 2014, Pakistan scored 126 out of 174 on the Corruption Perceptions Index published by the Transparency International, improving slightly from its previous score of 127 out of 175 in 2013. But who cares? In all earnestness, a veteran civil servant said that corruption has become a non-issue for the Pakistani electorate. In many cases, he went on to say, it is deemed as a virtue and an emblem of power. Anyone failing to accumulate wealth for him/her self, cannot do anything worthwhile for his electorate is a general belief. Thus talking against corruption and espousing merit is a recipe for failure, he said.
Why is corruption so acceptable is a question worth mulling over. Why is the distinction between the private and the public so blurred that makes people in power (mis)use public resources as if these were their private possession? That is particularly quite explicit in the post colonial states/societies.
Is there any connection of widening class disparity (or rich and poor gap) with the people’s overall indifference towards corruption? These questions will be addressed in the lines to follow but the very definition of ‘corruption’ should be the starting point.
Corruption is the abuse of entrusted power for private gain. It can be classified as grand, petty and political, depending on the amounts of money lost and the sector where it occurs. Corruption corrodes the fabric of society. It undermines people’s trust in political and economic systems, institutions and leaders. It can cost people their freedom, health, money - and sometimes their lives.
Corruption has many forms. Mostly the charges levelled against Sharifs are of political corruption which is "the abuse of public power, office, or resources by elected government officials for personal gain, by extortion, soliciting or offering bribes. It can also take the form of office holders maintaining themselves in office by purchasing votes by enacting laws which use taxpayers’ money".
If analysed diachronically, corruption the way it has been defined above, is a modern conception in its very essence. Terms like "entrusted power" and "private gain" etc. came in vogue after British ascendancy in India. In purely Marxist terms, corruption has inalienable nexus with the institution of private property. The historians of Indian economic history have highlighted this fact that ‘private property’ was first introduced by the British. In fact, it had its beginning in the revenue administration as land was the principal source of people’s livelihood. The procedures adopted for the revenue settlement and the documentation of the land record empowered the lower official of the concerned department and they started squeezing some part of surplus value out of the peasantry, which it produced. As a result of land having been declared as a private property (or a sellable product), money lending became endemic with disastrous consequences for the agrarian classes.
In order to rein in that practice, the British had to enact specific legislation like Land Alienation Act in the Punjab. However, this falls out of the purview of this article. All said and done, under the British, the scale of corruption was not allowed to spiral out of proportion. Therefore agrarian classes largely remained content. A few reasons need to be factored in here, the British bureaucrat generally had no interest in land (b) their social organisation was not based on biraderi (kinship) (c) the colonial officer was expected to exemplify uprightness, honesty and integrity and (d) they had hefty salaries and extremely comfortable lifestyle. Most importantly, under the British a legal structure was firmly in place and the politician had limited space to manoeuvre.
The British tried hard to inculcate among the Indian subjects peculiar moral values through education and other propaganda tools. ‘History’ and ‘English Literature’, the two disciplines primarily responsible for cultivating moral responsibility among the populace, were popularised. Some dictums and proverbs were introduced particularly for the colonial subjects. One such proverb was ‘honesty is the best policy’. This proverb is first found in the writings of Sir Edwin Sandys, the English politician and colonial entrepreneur, who was prominent in the Virginia Company which founded the first English settlement in America, at Jamestown, Virginia.
Reverting to the issue of corruption to Pakistan, I will underline two particular events, which unleashed the floodgates of corruption in our country namely the Partition of India and non-party based elections in 1985 which form the topic of my next column.