Caretaker government is a funny name. Caretaker. A government ostensibly charged to care for the nation betwixt the time that one has completed its term and another is elected? Caretaker. That which will take care? That which will take care of us? That which will take care of us, so, please, don’t worry?
Oh, I think we should worry just a little bit. Pakistanis aren’t accustomed to being taken care of very well. Consider what non-caretakers have done, military, democratic, somewhere in between. At least democratically elected non-caretakers have to return to voters to explain their performance. Imagine what people with nothing to answer for at the end of two or three months might do.
Oh, yes. I’d worry just a little bit. Caretakers. Do you remember how well Pakistan was cared for by the parade of excellent Pakistanis that President Ghulam Ishaq Khan had somehow managed to install in between the democratic efforts presided over by, Allah bless her soul, Shaheed Mohtarma BB and, Allah protect and guide him, Mian Nawaz Sharif? I do.
Shahid Javed Burki was finance minister once upon a time. An eminently sensible and decent man, Burki sahib took a sabbatical from the World Bank to help right Pakistan’s economic ship.
That caretaker government, and his economic vision, produced the most centralised fiscal situation in Pakistan’s history, with a National Finance Commission “award” for Islamabad and its patriotic bureaucrats, and an NFC punishment for the subversive provinces that do nothing but bicker about languages, culture and their share of the pie. It took more than a decade for Pakistan to correct that fiscal imbalance – and it is entirely possible that at its highest point during that caretaker government, a skewed fiscal distribution between the centre and the periphery, contributed greatly to the destruction of the ‘patriotism’ of Pakistanis that enjoy Baloch ethnicity.
Moeen Qureshi was prime minister once too. The Election Commission has recently declared dual nationals (which was the most charitable way to describe the allegedly NIC-less Qureshi) to be eligible for the job. I’d definitely worry about the kind of care that shall be taken, unless that ECP declaration was retroactively directed solely at Qureshi.
As a Pakistani born in another country, I’m rather comfortable with the concept of dual nationality itself. The discomfort we should all have is when logic is subverted in the Islamic Republic. If a dual national can’t be a non-caretaker prime minister, it boggles the mind as to why dual nationality would not problematise someone’s candidature for caretaker PM.
Caretakers seem to take the word quite seriously, applying their bodies and souls to trying to care for Pakistan the best way they can. I’ve never doubted the sincerity and competence of people like Shahid Javed Burki, or Moeen Qureshi, or the late, great Mahbub-ul-Haque. My worry about Pakistan being taken care of does not stem from questions about prospective prime ministerial and cabinet members’ competence, or integrity.
I also think Pakistanis around the world, and in Pakistan, have come a long way on the issue of democracy. I don’t know any serious people of stature that believe undemocratic rule is a good idea – whether it comes through a familiar instrument of delivery (military coup), or a novel one (an elongated caretaking period). So this too should not be such a big worry, as far as caretaking is concerned.
The thing that Pakistanis do need to worry about, as far as a caretaker government is concerned, is not a lack of competence or the absence of a commitment to democracy. It is that our incoming caretaker government may have too much of both. And in this zeal to serve the nation, to do good deeds, and to take the best care possible, this caretaker government will make political decisions of deep, strategic importance and consequences that no one but an elected government should be making.
In the simplest terms possible, a caretaker government’s job is to fill up empty office space, and facilitate the electoral process by providing a steady hand on the steering wheel for the administrative machinery of the nation. It should do no more and no less than to deal with the most basic of functions.
There is another way to put this. A caretaker government does not have the legitimacy, the authority, the mandate or the right to make any decisions that may have a bearing on Pakistan beyond the elections. That is the basic definition of an ideal caretaker government – to take care of things for the duration of its life, and no more.
It should also be clear why this point needs to be made, made clearly and made often as we transition, inshallah, for the first time between democratically elected governments.
Why should decent and competent Pakistanis lessen the burden of our venal and corrupt politicians? Why should politicians get to enjoy five years of pain-free patronage and protocol, whilst the tough decisions are made by technocrats who must not only be subjected to the derision of observers and analysts on all sides of the political spectrum, but who are also almost always, not very intimately connected to the people that will be influenced by those decisions?
The only answer is that they shouldn’t. Politicians make beds that only politicians must have to sleep on. A caretaker dispensation that makes serious decisions about the economy, about security or about foreign policy will be guilty not only of acting far beyond its legitimacy, but also of laundering political incompetence and corruption. Pakistanis must not abide the cleansing of politicians’ sins by a group of technocrats that do not enjoy a people’s mandate.
This does not mean that Pakistan is not in the throes of a convergence of multiple emergencies. Pakistan is staring a fiscal and monetary crisis in the face. Electricity loadshedding during the summer of 2013 will be memorable in the worst way.
The freedom enjoyed by Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and assorted other terrorist groups is terrifying. Important things are happening on the world stage, in which Pakistan features prominently, partly because of geography, and partly because it is a member of the UN Security Council and the UN Human Rights Council. Within the international arena, the looming US withdrawal from Afghanistan and President Hamid Karzai’s increasing sense of isolation and despair, figure prominently. Yet the massive humanitarian crisis in Syria, India’s unpredictable behaviour since December 2012, and Iran’s on-going crisis of international legitimacy, is no less important.
Yet these concurrent crises – of the economy, of energy, of national security and of global affairs – should constitute the core script of the most important election in Pakistan’s history. That we could even be discussing the possibility of an unelected caretaker government taking decisions that would solve these problems is scarier than all the crises put together. It shows that a five-year-old democracy is still an infant democracy. But that’s ok. It simply means we must care for, and ask questions of our democracy even more carefully and deliberately. Take care.
The writer is an analyst and commentator, and Campaign Director for Alif Ailaan. www.mosharrafzaidi.com
Mosharraf Zaidi, "The care that needs taking," The News. 2013-03-20.Keywords: