Book Review: Democracy and Governance by Bilal Ahmed
PAKISTANby Bilal Qureshi | on March 22nd, 2009 | 0 Comments
Political and cultural problems do not emanate in a day. There is always a history to them. The emergence of Bangladesh was not just a conspiracy of India against Pakistan. Its roots can be traced in the formative years of Pakistan when Jinnah refused to accept the cultural identity of Bengalis by enforcing Urdu on them. Thus the founding father of Pakistan himself refused to acknowledge the Bengali cultural identity entrenched and embedded in their history and traditions. Bengalis would not have thought even in their wildest imagination that the creation of Pakistan would result in the annihilation of their cultural ethos.

That was not all; Bengalis were also politically alienated and subjugated through the creation of one unit. The objective of the one unit was to cut Bengalis to their size by increasing the vote bank of what was called West Pakistan. On the other hand, through one unit the multiple cultural identities deeply rooted in history were also denied. Sindh, Punjab, Balochistan and the Frontier Province have their own unique identities and histories. Lumping them together as a one single entity was a joke that did not serve any purpose.

There was an acute shortage of infrastructure, industry and human capital at the time of the creation of Pakistan. Urdu speaking immigrants and the Punjabi elite filled that vacuum. Recruitment of the Punjabis in the armed forces was not a new phenomenon. The British government had already preferred Punjabi soldiers. The same tradition was followed after the creation of Pakistan. The result: Bengalis were further alienated from the power structure of the state.

Tahir Kamran’s book Democracy and Governance in Pakistan plainly demonstrates that the creation of Bangladesh was the result of erroneous policies pursued by the civil military bureaucratic oligarchy of Pakistan. Bengalis were continuously and consistently denied there political and cultural rights that finally resulted in the dismemberment of Pakistan.

Kamran has tried to address the important question of why democratic institutions could not flourish in Pakistan while India, with almost similar historical experiences, managed to at length in his book.

Kamran writes Jinnah reposed no confidence in his colleagues. Immediately after the creation of Pakistan he opted for the office of Governor General. He trusted bureaucracy more than politicians. That set a wrong tradition at the outset.

After the death of Jinnah, first Liaquat Ali and then Ghulam Muhammed abused the powers of the Governor General. Planning committee, a club of bureaucrats, became more important than political parties and electoral politics.

Kamran also writes the area constituting Pakistan, was the recruiting ground of British army. Landowners of Punjab supplied human fodder for the world wars from this area. So there was already a nexus between the military and the landed elite before the creation of Pakistan. That nexus got strengthened after the creation of Pakistan. This implies that there was no conflict of interest between the landed elite and the military bureaucracy. However, initially the civil bureaucracy called the shots while the military acted as a junior partner, this continued till Ayub Khan’s era.

Another paradox of the new country was the constituencies of the Muslim League leadership. Most of the stalwarts of the party were from UP or those parts of the subcontinent that became part of India. The result was that the leadership of the Muslim League was reluctant to go for the polls based on adult franchise.

Insecure leadership of the Muslim League, common interest of the landed elite and civil military bureaucracy in northern areas of united India, superiority complex of civil bureaucracy and centralisation of power from the very outset never allowed political institutions to gain roots. On top of that, Bengalis who had interest in democracy were marginalised.

Another interesting point raised by Tahir Kamran is concerning the linkages between religious parties and the creation of Pakistan. It is generally argued that religious parties were against the idea of Pakistan. Kamran dismisses this claim and informs us that not all but many of the Deobandis’ important figures supported the idea of a new country. They, in fact, wanted a laboratory where they could practice Islam. Pakistan was an ideal situation for them. So it is misleading to say that religious parties had no role in the creation of Pakistan and it was only the secular politicians that made it happen.

Kamran contends that massive investment in infrastructure made in Punjab and Frontier Province by the British Raj in the form of rail tracks and canals reflected their vested interests. The infrastructure, such as canals, was built to support industrialisation back home. The objective was to provide raw material to the growing industrial sector in Britain. Further rail tracks were built to provide a secure supply line to the troops in case Russia attacked India. So rail tracks were laid down owing to insecurity created by the expansionist designs of Russian empire. Here I would like to slightly disagree with the author. Economic development is never a zero-sum game. Investment in infrastructure might reflect the vested interests of the coloniser, but it also helped in the provision of new jobs and economic opportunities to the locals.

Kamran maintains that bad governance was the result of continuous bureaucratic intervention — first civil and then military — in the body politics of Pakistan. Recent researches prove that effective and efficient bureaucracy played a major role in the speedy growth and development of Asian Tigers. Similarly, without underplaying the significance of democracy, we can safely say that India despite solid democratic institutions is a poorly governed country. Finally, failure of democracy and bad governance is not confined to Pakistan. This dilemma has been faced by almost all the developing world in the last six decades. We hope that Tahir Kamran would try to address this rather complex phenomenon rooted in the discourses of modernity and tradition in his next monograph.
About Author
Tahir Kamran, (Urdu: طاھر کامران‎), is a notable Pakistani historian and former Iqbal fellow at the University of Cambridge,[1] as professor in the Centre of South Asian Studies. He has authored four books and has written several articles specifically on the history of the Punjab, sectarianism, democracy, and governance. He is the former head of the department of history at the Government College University in Lahore, Pakistan where he founded the biannual