The elected vs the selected

The 70-year history of Pakistan can be summarised in various ways. ‘A history of class struggle’ would be a prompt response from a Marxist, meaning the oppressed classes have been struggling against the oppressors. ‘A history of religious vs the secular’ would be another explanation, in which the religious right – from the Objectives Resolution and all through the anti-Ahmadi movements to the Nizam-e-Mustafa rigmarole and the blasphemy brigade – has tried to assert its supremacy against any liberal and secular ideas. 

Then there would be one explanation attributing everything wrong to the supposed ‘feudalism’ in the country and the forces of capitalism or industrialisation trying to get some political space. Rural and urban tug-of-war may be another lens of history. But keeping in mind the recent statements from the government and the outcry from the JIT, probably the best description of the history of Pakistan may be the ‘history of the struggle between the elected and the selected’. The elected being the politicians and the selected being the civil and military bureaucracy and the technocrats who line up to support undemocratic forces.

It is not uncommon to hear degrading and demeaning comments against the entire elected lot. The most common is that the elected come through a process that is not transparent as opposed to the selected who purportedly qualify to be selected. The elected, so the argument goes, are the ones who can never compete in a merit-based exam as the selected do. The selected pride themselves in being the true servants of the state as opposed to the elected whose integrity and loyalty to the state is always under question.

Let’s briefly accept this argument and have a look at some of the unelected officials who were more like technocrats ie experts in their own fields of specialization against whom no elected star could shine because of their lack of training in anything. For example, the second prime minister of Pakistan, Khawja Nazimudddin, was no expert in anything, but the third governor general of the country – Malik Ghulam Mohammad (MGM) – was a renowned expert in finance, or so some people said in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The elected prime minister was no match to the shenanigans of MGM.

The elected and one of the most respected politicians of early Pakistan, Nazimuddin, was dubbed Quaid-e-Qillat after the murder of Quaid-e-Millat, Liaquat Ali Khan; just because there was a temporary shortage (qillat in Urdu) of food items under his rule. The technocrat, MGM, lost his mind, went senile, and spewed expletives against anyone who came to meet him during his last months in office. He was replaced by another ‘selected’ Maj-Gen Iskandar Mirza who looked down upon the entire election process and never allowed any national elections to be held as per the first constitution under which he himself had taken oath.

In the same 1950s, there was another stalwart of the judiciary who came through a selection process – Justice Munir, who resurrected a moribund ‘doctrine of necessity’ from the coffins of judicial history and set an ignominious example for the other ‘selected’ ones to follow against the ‘elected’. Then there was a selected General Ayub Khan who must have come through a ‘merit-based’ system, as they claim. This general selected himself to be the president of Pakistan and appointed himself ‘field marshal’ in recognition of services nobody knows about.

The political leaders who believed in a parliamentary system based on adult franchise, such as Suhrawardy, Fatima Jinnah, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, and hundreds of others had no respect in the eyes of our selected general. Generals Yahya Khan, Amir Abdullah Khan Niazi and Tikka Khan, all must have come through a rigorous selection process that is touted as much more transparent than an electoral process which is open to rigging and manipulation. Justices Moulvi Mushtaq and Anwarul Haq were also never elected and must have been star performers in their selected lot to reach top positions without any contamination from the corrupt elected ones.

Even the selections that are done by the elected ones have produced some extraordinary results. Generals Zia and Musharraf are cases in point. Both were selected by the elected prime ministers, Z A Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, and proved that selection, even by the elected ones, is not as reliable as some want us to believe. Justices Sajjad Ali Shah, Irshad Hasan Khan, and Abdul Hameed Dogar, all came through the same selection process, and so did Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry.

Then there are lines of selected civilian and military bureaucrats who passed the competitive process, were never elected, but have done much more harm to public institutions than all the elected leaders could have done. The current drama being played in the name of the Panama leaks appears to be a continuation of the same ‘elected vs selected’ struggle in the history of Pakistan. The elected are bound to bow and crawl and creep, and the selected are entitled to mock and malign.

The clash of institutions is not a clash of personalities; it appears to be a clash of two processes: one relies on people’s support and the other drives its legitimacy from the narrative of integrity and loyalty to state institutions that is somehow linked with a skewed sense of superiority of the selected.

The writer holds a PhD from the
University of Birmingham, UK and works in Islamabad.

Email: Mnazir1964@yahoo.co.uk