Taking Jinnah to the district Nazim

Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf has formally set a timetable for elections to local bodies to be completed by July 2005. It will...

Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf has formally set a timetable for elections to local bodies to be completed by July 2005. It will be only the second local government elections throughout Pakistan since President Musharraf unveiled his Devolution of Power Plan in August 2001. He has claimed that his government has established the new local government system which ‘‘reflects true democracy and public representation’’. He has also underlined the need for bringing ‘‘enlightened and moderate’’ leaders to the fore in the forthcoming local bodies elections in 2005 and general elections in 2007.

Pakistan is no model of democracy. The overcentralised politico-administrative structure and elitism have traditionally been the hallmarks of the Pakistani polity. In the early years of independence, the National Assembly at one stage had 200 landlords and 30 tribal leaders in the house of 310 members. The subsequent years saw only cosmetic change. Even Ayub Khan’s Basic Democracy was intended primarily to preserve the status quo through non-party local elections. In 1979, local elections were held throughout Pakistan in a bid to revive the decaying system. Elections were held again in 1985 and 1990.

However, these experiments failed to institutionalise the local governments as formal organs of the state. It was only General Pervez Musharraf who introduced a well-conceived and well-structured Devolution of Power Plan seeking to change the entire governance paradigm. And the results are not too bad, as the 34-member delegation of Indian Panchayat leaders from 18 States discovered during their recent visit to Lahore, Islamabad, Peshawar, Sargodha, Multan, Muzaffargarh, Hyderabad and Karachi.

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As the Local Government Book, prepared by the National Reconstruction Bureau, claims, ‘‘the objective of devolution is to solve most the problems of most of the people within the district. These include respect for rights, improving service delivery and bringing justice to people’s doorstep so that citizens can be assured of being respected and protected’’. There are striking similarities between the Indian Panchayati Raj system and the 3-tier local government system now in operation in Pakistan.Like the Indian system, the Pakistani model too is designed to place the traditionally underprivileged in power by revolutionalising the levels of representation of women and other weaker sections of society. Both India and Pakistan provide for a 33 per cent quota for women. While the Indian Panchayati Raj system provides reservations for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes and in some States for other backward classes, seats are reserved for peasants/workers and minorities in Pakistan.

The differences between the two models are no less striking. While the reservation for women, SCs and STs in India has been extended to the posts of heads and other office bearers of the PR system, the same in Pakistan is limited to the council members only. The elections at the Union level (equivalent of gram panchayat) alone are direct. The direct elections in a Union also bring into being directly elected Zila and Tehsil councils.The directly elected Union councillors constitute the electoral college for Zila Nazim, Tehsil Nazim, their deputies as well as members on the reserved seats in the Zila and Tehsil councils. The institutionalisation of the local government system in Pakistan is characterised by the five fundamentals of devolution, often described as five Ds – devolution of political power, decentralisation of administrative authority, distribution of resources to districts, de-concentration of management functions and diffusion of the power authority nexus. The system is in its infancy and is still acquiring wings to fly.

There are of course some structural flaws in the system as well. And yet, the power relationship in Pakistan at the local level has undergone a radical, if not as yet irreversible, change. Despite the system still being fledgling, the district government has emerged as a powerful entity. The directly-elected Nazim now enjoys power to levy taxes and approve budgets and development plans. The Nazim has been placed at the apex of the district administration, replacing the traditional authority of the all-powerful deputy commissioners. Renamed as District Co-ordination Officer, the federal appointee has been stripped of judicial and magisterial power and has also been made subordinate to the District Nazim.It is a revolutionary step which seeks to alter the elite-based system of governance.

On the flip side, President Musharraf’s Devolution Plan has created a rift between the Provinces and the district governments.Provinces complain of being bypassed.The bureaucracy and the political parties too have adopted a non co-operative approach. It is being perceived by sections of people as a top-down policy enunciated by President to build a local constituency to counter the powers of politicians at the provincial and national levels. In the absence of fiscal empowerment, the local bodies are largely dependent on the federal government. The weaknesses apart, decentralisation per se cannot be faulted, for it is a universally accepted principle to bring government closer to the people and to foster participatory form of governance.There is a lot that the two countries can learn from each other-both from what each did right and did wrong.

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The writer led a 34-member delegation of elected Panchayat representatives from 18 States to Pakistan (14-28 March, 2005)