Some reflections on the life and work of Sartaj Aziz

When my wife and I called on Satrtaj Aziz in March 2023, he had then celebrated his 94th birthday. He was in remarkably good health. That was the first time I visited him at the spacious house he had built near Islamabad, in the backs of the hills overlooking the Pakistani capital. He took us to the back of the house which had a large grass-covered lawn where, he said, he practised putting. He was still playing golf.

I write this tribute to Sartaj who died on January 2, 2024 as he was approaching his 95th birthday. This is not an obituary – plenty of those have appeared – but an assessment of the role he could have played in today’s fractured political system and an economy that is on the verge of collapse. During his long public life, he was able to build bridges over the many political divides that are now obstructing the development of the country’s political system. He was able to work comfortably with the people with whom he disagreed. Having worked in important positions in foreign institutions, he was also highly regarded by foreigners who had a deep interest in Pakistan’s well-being.

This short piece will take the readers over some of my dealings with Satrtaj during the time we worked closely with one another. In Pakistan’s often-troubled history, a person of Sartaj’s caliber, dynamism, patriotism and strong desire for doing good for the nation could play an important role in making the country work again.

Sartaj was active in the student movement that campaigned for the creation of an independent state for the Muslim population of British India. His large office on the premises of the Lahore-based Beaconhouse National University, the BNU, had his picture with Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah prominently displayed on one of the walls. He was then the Vice Chancellor of the BNU.

My association with Sartaj goes back to the mid-sixties when he worked at the Planning Commission and I was deputy secretary in charge of managing foreign aid in West Pakistan, then one of the country’s two provinces. He was one of the leading thinkers in the Commission; the other two were Mahbubul Haq and Moeen Baqai. At this point I need to step back a bit and refer the conversation I had with Muhammad Ayub Khan, the former military president of Pakistan. That was in the winter of 1974, a few months before Ayub Kahn died of a massive heart attack. I had then begun work on a book on Pakistan’s economy which was published in 1980 by London’s Macmillan Press. I told him of the book I had begun to work on. “Would it cover my period?” he asked. I said that I treated his 11 years in office, from 1958 to 1969, as the country’s golden period. “Zulfi doesn’t think so,” he said, referring to the statements Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was making after resigning from the Ayubian cabinet in which he had worked first as Commerce Minister and then as Foreign Minister.

I then went on to ask the question which was to be the central piece of the conversation with the former president. He had read the books by some of the American economists who had written after spending years working in the Federal Planning Commission and in the two Provincial Planning and Development Departments. The most notable of these accounts is Gustaf F Papanek’s Pakistan’s Development: Social Goals and Private Incentives published in 1967 by Harvard University Press. The book advocated that other countries in the developing world should follow the approach Pakistan had adopted under Ayub Khan. “Reflecting your own experience in taking Pakistan forward, what would you regard as your most important contribution?” I asked the former president. His answer surprised me.

“No matter what Zulfi says, I was not a dictator,” he responded. “I sought and eagerly followed the advice I received from experts on policy issues and on the financing of large public sector projects. That is the reason why I built the Planning Commission. When I took charge of the country, the Commission had only two economists of any consequence: Mahbubul Haq and Sartaj Aziz. It was clear to me that they needed good deal of support so when the American president sent over a team to ask me what they could do for Pakistan, I asked for economists to be sent to work in the Commissions and the Panning Departments in the two provinces.” This led to several years of association with Pakistan of Harvard University’s Development Advisory Service, the DAS. Papanek was a member of this team.

I recalled this conversation with Sartaj during a visit to Pakistan in 2008. He took me out for lunch to a restaurant in Lahore and said what Ayub Khan had said to me was totally true. Said Aziz: “The DAS team was enormously helpful to us in the Commission. However, when Bhutto became the head of the government, he had no interest in talking to experts. He operated by his gut feelings; he had no use for advice.” The Planning Commission continued to exist but had little say on policy matters and was not consulted about the pros or cons of investing large amounts of public resources on projects. When we had that conversation, Sartaj was of the view that there was no political interest in reviving the type of Planning Commission to replicate the one that existed during the Ayub Khan period. Instead, he thought, we should set up a body in the private sector. He asked me to draw up the plans for such a body for which he will find funding from the budget from the BNU coffers.

Thus was born the Institute of Public Policy, the IPP. However, when Sartaj Aziz resigned from the BNU and went to Islamabad to take up a position in the government that came into office when Nawaz Sharif won the election and became the prime minister, the BNU withdrew its support from the IPP. At that point the Burki family stepped in with financing to keep the institution operating and the IPP became the Burki Institute of Public Policy or BIPP.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 22^nd, 2024.

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