Genealogy of the present

In 1887, Friedrich Neitsczhe wrote his seminal work, The Genealogy of Morals, attempting to understand the socio-psychological and historical foundations of western morality. It posited that modern man cannot comprehend why they act in ways considered moral without understanding the foundations of this ethic.

In an analogous manner, to understand the inclinations of humans or members of an existing institution, there is need to explore the cerebral inceptions of their normative tendencies. Biases, prejudices, norms or values are largely acquired through socialisation or acculturation.

In our context, the feudal class, business, military, bureaucracy and judiciary influence and shape security, social, political and economic policies. Politics is niggardly tolerated. Press, media and professionals are important but mostly survive navigating the big fish.

While socio-political dynamics of the past are well documented, their evolution after the post-Charter of Democracy (2006) period are mostly unrecorded, nascent and pubescent. This compact aimed at curtailing military and judicial intrusion into civilian supremacy had far-reaching consequences.

The aforementioned institutions jostle for power and influence but are interconnected through intermarriages and other social networks. They share beliefs and norms about religion, women, equality, justice and rights.

Although most long for a competent and honest political government, their beliefs about liberal democratic values, freedom of expression and federalism versus regional rights are nebulous and clichéd. They decry corruption by the politicians but find nothing wrong in the many ways in which their own wealth and resources owe themselves largely to corner cutting, nepotism, tax avoidance, plot culture or gaining undue advantages through kinship ties with the same classes that they vilify.

This results in resource capture through self-serving policies consisting of SROs and diversion of public wealth away from the private sector, resulting in skewed and sub-optimal resource allocation and productivity. While yearning to political power they lack the essential ballot-box support that politicians with rural background possess from baradri and patron-client politics of the vast feudal agrarian outback.

In the view of this elite and its acolyte middle class, politicians are mostly rural boors or city parvenues who are led by personal interests at the expense of progress and democracy.

The deliberate attempts to malign the civilians find a stark contrast with co-adoption of the same class to legitimise unelected governments.

Periodic yearning for altruistic strongmen arises even though experience with such bonapartism has brought irreversible damage to a diverse polity.

There have always been attempts to localise politics by manipulating against the growth of potent nationwide political parties through creation of ‘king’s parties’ and creation of regional or ethnic, divisive, substitute groups.

These power groups share similar lifestyles, study in the same privileged schools, Iive in posh localities, are members of the same closeted clubs, watch the same TV channels and frequent the same domestic and foreign high end malls.

The ancestral beginnings of most of the present day crises of institutional power may be traced back to when it was decided by the establishment, with a tacit nod of the judicature, to oust a civil government conceived as getting too threatening for the applecart. Memo and Dawn leaks, stepping on foreign policy and security policy domains, the unrealised extension to an army boss, earlier the Kargil fiasco and the Article 6 trial of a COAS for abrogation of the Constitution, added fuel to fire.

There is by now sufficient evidence showing (notably the self-incriminating video recordings of late NAB Judge Arshad Malik and Pervez Elahi, the evidence before the SC of Justice Shaukat Siddiqui, the Saqib Nisar audio and recent confessionals by Gen Bajwa) that an unmentioned design was instituted, starting in 2010, to oust certain political actors, portrayed as typical of dynastic, corrupt politics, threatening the subsisting power structure and to bring in a co-opted “third force” to replace the old order and usher in an efficient, pliant and cleaner regime.

All stratagems of political engineering like blackmailing and pressurising of supporters of the ruling parties, instituting false cases, besides alleged poll day rigging like the RTS collapse, were used to derive desired results from the 2018 elections.

An elected Prime Minister was disqualified for not receiving unreceivables. His daughter, not a public office holder, was condemned to seven-year imprisonment on charges of corruption while not holding any state office.

Uncommonly, a JIT was formed to investigate charges against a former PM in a stipulated timeframe and a supervisory judge was appointed to ensure completion of the investigation followed by a conviction by a NAB case within six months.

A SC puisne judge, who passed the Faizabad dharna judgment finding an army officer in breach of his oath, was arraigned before the SJC for non-declaration of a spouse’s assets, unwarranted by law. The judge was finally acquitted by a majority of the Supreme Court. An unprecedented curative review was filed.

Serious questions still surround the questionable interpretation of Article 63(A) that continues to resonate in the existing national crises. The sudden convolution of the transfer of a DIG police into a suo motu case that has become a contentious 3-2 vs 4-3 controversy raises eyebrows. A torn parliament is decried. A divisive judiciary and doubts of bench fixing rankles while demands for a full court are declined.

After failing to obtain results through long marches and capital storming, ever since the ouster through a VONC, two provincial assemblies stood dissolved by a party to put pressure for early elections. This action with questionable motives and vires remains legally unquestioned, raising more doubts. Anticipatory staying of a bill raises doubts while general consensus exists on regulation of powers under Article 184(3) of the Constitution.

A strong bias has always existed against civilian supremacy through parliament which in our context mostly translates into dominance of the rural aristocracy and certain business groups, regarded by the elite as unfit to rule, while non-civilian regimes have no better record to offer.

In this struggle the common man is mostly ignored. It is forgotten that in our neighborhood there are countries where rampant malfeasance subsists alongside parliamentary politics but they have put into practice the firm conviction that more rather than less democracy is the ultimate solution to the endemic ills a post-colonial polity inherits. Their results in terms of economic performance are self-evident.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 8^th, 2023.

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