Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [41]
However, these moves also addressed a very real problem, which exists in India as well as Pakistan. This is that in both countries local elected bodies have traditionally had very weak powers. Real local authority has remained where it was established in British colonial days, in the hands of unelected civil servants whose powers are vastly more sweeping than those of their Western equivalents (including not just powers that in the West belong to elected municipalities, but some of those of the judiciary as well). Even under ‘democracy’, as far as most of their citizens are concerned, the Pakistani and Indian states therefore function more like ‘elected authoritarianisms’. The weakness of local government is especially damaging in the cities, where it hinders the development of new kinds of reformist urban politics.
On the other hand, whereas in British days these civil servants were at least independent of politics and in a position to guarantee minimally honest administration, today they are not just responsible to the national and provincial governments, but are subject to endless pressure from elected politicians at the national and provincial levels. This gives tremendous powers of patronage and harassment to these politicians and their parties, but is extremely bad for honest and effective administration. One consequence is the constant transfers of officials on political grounds, meaning that very few have the chance ever to get to know their districts or areas of responsibility properly.
Ayub’s ‘Basic Democracy’ scheme, and Musharraf’s ‘Devolution’ were both meant to address these problems by giving real power to local elected bodies. In Musharraf’s case, he also tried to strengthen the position of women by reserving a third of elected municipal seats for them. However, in both Ayub’s case and Musharraf’s, after they fell from power their civilian successors simply swept away these reforms, with no attempt to distinguish the good from the bad sides, in order to restore their own power and patronage.
In Musharraf’s case, however, his devolution was also widely criticized because he had weakened the police, contributing to several embarrassing collapses of local police forces in the face of Taleban attack. Musharraf had done this by removing the police from the authority of the District Commissioner (the old British ‘Burra Sahib’, now renamed in rather politically correct Blairite fashion the ‘District Coordinating Officer’), and placing them under the elected councils.
This was meant to address a terrible problem in Pakistan (and still more in India): the extreme unaccountability of the local police, which has contributed to so many ghastly atrocities against ordinary people. The problem was that the local councils proved wholly incapable of taking responsibility for the police. In consequence the latter, with no one to force them to take action, developed a strong tendency when faced with any crisis simply to do nothing – not only because of natural somnolence, but out of fear that they would have to take the responsibility if something went wrong. In other fields of administration, too, the newly elected politicians proved too weak and inexperienced to exercise their powers properly – though they might have learned to do so given more time.
There is something therefore both strange and tragic about Musharraf’s devolution and its abolition: strange that a ‘military dictator’ should actually have weakened the state’s powers of repression; tragic that elected ‘democratic’ governments should have undermined democratic progress by weakening local democracy; but above all tragic that a reform with some truly positive democratic and modern aspects should have foundered on the traditional hard realities of South Asian society. Local government reform was therefore part of Musharraf’s declared spirit of ‘Enlightened Moderation