Wishing upon a Xi

Everywhere we look, there is disquiet with the 'system'. For the poor, illiterate, non-elite majority, whatever works in this 'system' isn’t enough. Some drown their sorrows in the intoxicating depths of the Tehreek-e-Labbaik – everything can be solved by giving into a well-grounded rage against the elite. Others take up arms against the 'system' – the TTP, Daesh, the Baloch Liberation Army – the only way to fight for one’s beliefs, one’s identity, one’s rights, is to blow up things. Others still become ankle weights for industrial and feudal elites – stick around the boss long enough, and you might get a government job. It isn’t Shangri-La, but it is better than life at the Pakistani median.

But the complaints against the system don’t stop at the bridge. They travel with you, through the gallis and nullahs, across the roads that keep getting contracted out to the same brilliant contractors that keep building roads that get washed away after two showers, up the mountains where the Yousufzai highlanders’ forefathers came from, down the valleys and through the deserts where the Panhwars and Halepotas still rule. The complaints of the Pakistani elite are so much more intense. They have plenty to eat, plenty of adulation, plenty of RTs and Likes, and plenty of voters that will never tire of their divine diva-ness. And yet they complain: “Alas, if only I had the power that President Xi has”. “Alas, if only we could operate here like the Egyptians do!”. “Alas, if only our democracy was really truly democratic, and not democratic like the democratic in which I have to ask around before I decide to do something”.

Life is so hard for the elite and uber elite Pakistani decision-maker. At multiple public events and briefings, prime ministers, military leaders, and everyone that feeds at their feet, what we get to hear, and witness, is an unending whine about the manner in which Pakistan’s system compromises the ability of individual saviours to act decisively and quickly. Promise after promise after promise – shattered by the vicious combination of talking without deliberate notes, with an eye to win a laugh or two from the peanut gallery and without the competence to actually follow up and make things happen. And yet it isn’t the mouthing off, or the constant need for the affection of the crowd, or the incompetence and lack of preparation that keeps our VVIPs from delivering on their promises: it’s the darn system. If only it was attuned to the inner sincerity and greatness of our great leaders, our great saviours, our great, indispensable, un-retirable patriotic ubermensch – the 21st century Mard-e-Momins.

This romance for a top-down authoritarian magic pill is not just a post-2018 affliction, nor exclusively the domain of generals. Nawaz Sharif once wanted to be Amirul Momineen. Asif Ali Zardari commands a system of power in Sindh that is nothing short of an aristocratic order where all power flows through and to him. Until a few years ago, these tendencies were something to be ashamed of. Democracy was still seen as a public good, so pristine that it would be unbecoming for democrats to openly claim that they wished they had the powers that exist at the top of China’s Communist Party system.

China’s incredible economic success of course is not built on the top-down version of China that the Western world is always keen for us Anglophile postcolonial societies to swallow. It is built on an incredibly intricate and decentralised system of governance in which the only way to become a Xi is to rise to the top of the pile of an extraordinary stock of municipal and provincial leaders. Xi’s own rise required repeated rejection: seven times he was denied membership of the Youth League of the Communist Party, nine times full membership to the actual Communist Party. He was a local level leader before anyone outside China had ever heard of him, serving in Hebei, Fujian, Zhejiang and Shanghai. Oh, and he was deeply involved in the Chinese Military Commission as a young man, and got a PhD from the finest graduate school in his country, to boot. To understand this better, I’ll put this in Pakistanian: to become Xi, a Pakistani leader would have to be an effective union councilor, a tehsil municipal chairman, a provincial deputy secretary, a Ministry of Defence (read IC) contractor, a chief minister (in all four provinces), and also have a PhD from Stanford or Harvard, or at a minimum, LUMS or Habib University.

So yes, one can understand military and civilian leaders wanting to have what Xi has, but then they should also understand that the reason Xi’s powers work in China is because they are woven from a thread that is consistent, true and strong. The desperate wanna-be authoritarians in Pakistan may then argue, “well, isn’t that why we should change the system, to make ours more like China?”. Great. Let’s work through that proposition.

The system in China is one that requires a ceaseless capacity to track, trace and monitor what the people of China want, what they are thinking and what they are about to do. We can, and should, debate how desirable this is on pure merit – but the Pakistan conversation on this doesn’t need to be philosophical or normative at all. Pakistan does not have the social, financial or political capital to pull it off – so even if there were no normative issues with a surveillance state that is often accused of violations of its people’s rights – Pakistan isn’t China because to be China is to have competence, capability and consistency.

Pakistan’s most important political questions hinge on changes or continuity in individual offices. This is the opposite of competence, capability and consistency. It is rule by ordinance by parliament. The extension of an extension of an extension – at the PMO, at MOFA, at the Secretariat, at the regulator and every and anywhere else – is a formula for many things. But China-like growth and Xi-like power? It will never happen.

All this, of course, happens to be good news. At the Supreme Court on Monday, Bench 5, comprising Justice Ijazul Ahsan, Justice Munib Akhtar and JUstice Mazahar Naqvi heard arguments from a Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government that wants to delay local government elections from a schedule that it assented to itself. The judges would have none of it. Later, in a case in which I am a petitioner, the judges also eschewed supporting the federal government’s efforts to control the HEC in violation of the spirit and letter of the Islamabad High Court decision in January that reinstated Dr Tariq Banuri as chairperson. In both cases, one can understand the view from the PMO and elsewhere: why can’t the PM just do what he pleases? Why so many laws and rules and constraints to him acting as he pleases?

The answer is that a messy democracy is a product of a large and colourful place. The lament often is that Pakistan is a hot mess. But this is no lament at all. Pakistan is a hot mess in the most glorious and important way. It is impossible for Pakistani society to entertain (for very long) the idea that any one individual, institution, ethnicity, party, or group, can possibly be so wise as to know what is best for all of us, all the time. Does this make Pakistan better than China or as good as the United States? No. They do them. We do us.

So what do we do?

We keep democracy-ing, keep federalism-ing, keep contesting and bickering and complaining. Nothing here is good enough. But nothing is incapable of being made better. We must be humble – hear what others want, and assess why they want those things. And also hear ourselves – what may we sound like to someone that doesn’t have what we have, has never had what we have, and may never have what we have.

Our biggest problem is not that we aren’t China enough, or our leaders aren’t Xi enough. Our problem is that we aren’t Pakistan, as per our constitution and our society’s character, enough. When we are, it won’t be Pakistani leaders whimsically wishing for the powers of other countries’ leaders’. It will be other countries that whimsically wish for the people and institutions that Pakistan has.

The writer is an analyst and commentator.