Independence, Sovereignty, Self-Reliance, Privatization, Industrial Revolution. These are, reportedly, the key words in vogue today. For our continuing good health, we are advised to swallow each of these new, sugar coated pills at least three times a day, once each on behalf of the COAS, the President and the Prime Minister. Fortified thus against the chilling post-cold war winds from the West, we should have no problems marching into the twenty-first century.
Yet we may be excused for doubting the efficacy of these “revolutionary” prescriptions for robustness. In truth, our dilemma is that the gentlemen, groups, classes and interests who are flogging the virtues of nationalist self-reliance and privatisation so religiously today are precisely those who, over the past four decades, have consciously worked to cripple our economy, wreck our pride and hustle our self-respect in pursuit of personal r parochial political gains. Tragically, this is what makes high talk of “putting lead in our knees and learning to stand on our own feet” so painfully undigestible.
Such had taste aside, we might justifiably seek concrete evidence of the goodies our leaders have in store for us. Mian Nawaz Sharif’s “economic package”, dusted in the Presidency, pledges a veritable “industrial revolution” which will solve all our problems. But a scrutiny of the economic incentives and measures announced by the PPP on 31st May, 1990, suggests that much of what is being proffered by the new government is simply old vinegar in new bottles. In any case, as per past experience, bureaucratic plans such as these are a dime a dozen and no proof at all of any puddings to be laid on in the future.
A perceptive comment, however, on the state of our national health has come not from President Ghulam Ishaq Khan but from “his old friend” Mr Moeen Qureshi, senior Vice President of The World Bank. Speaking in Lahore the other day, Mr Qureshi thought “the gravest flaw in Pakistan’s achievements is not strictly economic. It is the absence of political and social institutions capable of binding the nation together and mobilizing its great talents for development…. Pakistan has failed to define acceptably the relations between different tiers of government and between government and grass-roots organisation, has failed to resolve ethnic and cultural conflicts, has failed to agree on how to raise and distribute domestic resources.”
Mr Qureshi reminded the luminaries present that “Pakistan is a more personalized and less institutionalized society than at the time of independence…. we are unlikely to resolve the issue of domestic resource mobilization without a national consensus grounded in political realism about the necessity for a devolution of economic and financial power and based on a social contract that is forged among the different social and economic groups…. Pakistan needs to establish an understanding between the centre and the provinces, between the provinces and local bodies, between industrialists and workers and between landlords and tenants…. the armed forces too should be part of this social contract.”
The defining elements here, in contrast to those hypocritically bandied about in Islamabad, are Consensus, Devolution, Institutions and Social Contract. It is interesting that a professional economist like Mr Moeen Qureshi should emphasize the redeeming elements of political discourse in nation-building while politicians like Ghulam Ishaq Khan and Nawaz Sharif should focus only on narrow, bureaucratic reforms. It is remarkable, too, that the former should be concerned equally with the necessary and sufficient conditions for national development while the latter seem ignorant even of the distinction between the two notions.
Unfortunately, our immature ruling elites remain incapable of distinguishing between notions of nationality and nationhood, state and nation-state, nationalism and patriotism, self-reliance and dependence, independence and sovereignty, deregulation and privatization, control and management, in short between the cart and horse. That is why the solutions they advocate are half-baked and inconsequential.
President Ishaq Khan could, indeed, do worse than heed a few words of advice from his old compatriot, Mr Moeen Qureshi, who, interestingly enough, works in Washington!