Restoring Primacy of Basic Law

The Dawn, Pakistan

March 10, 2006

Opinion

By Mansoor Alam

PAKISTANI thinkers and intellectuals are deeply perturbed by the fact that in the last 58 years Pakistan has made little political, economic, social and cultural progress whereas India, its traditional rival and China, its traditional friend, with diametrically opposed political systems, economies and culture, have both made amazing progress in every field.

Tasneem Siddiqui writing in this paper about this year’s Davos economic summit says that India and China had occupied centrestage while Pakistan did not get even a passing reference as an emerging market. He asks why Pakistan with all its economic reforms and openness is lagging behind India in almost all respects.

He thinks that our policymakers lack the moral courage to admit that our “reform” is not working; that our governance is abysmally poor; our education system has gone haywire. It is not that the people of Pakistan do not have the potential and where-withal to reach the take-off stage, (which ability they had demonstrated in the sixties but somehow failed to live up to the promise). The East Asian Tigers (and now China and India), which started out much later, remained continuously on the move on a linear graph whereas Pakistan has kept moving in a circle.

These questions are being raised by many people who want to get to the root of Pakistan’s political, economic, and social ills. A personal observation is that the situation has been created because a clique has been ruling this country since the death of Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan.

It has so strengthened its grip on power that it no longer cares about what ordinary Pakistanis feel. Elements of this clique know from experience that they can get away with murder without paying a price as they did in 1965, 1971, 1977 and later. Consequently, misgovernance, corruption, injustice and poverty have increased with every passing year. In spite of political changes the world over, in Pakistan the same clique comes to power again and again on the promise of change only to betray the people and indulge in blatant self aggrandizement.

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