"… The first duty of a government is to maintain law and order, so that the life, property and religious beliefs of its subjects are fully protected by the state… The second thing that occurs to me is this. One of the biggest curses from which India is suffering… is bribery and corruption. That really is a poison. We must put it down with an iron hand…"

-- The Quaid-i-Azam, Constituent Assembly, Aug 11, 1947

 Corruption was one of the main concerns of the leaders of Pakistan and India as they prepared to take over from the British. The reason was the rise of the hydra-headed monster of corruption during the Second World War, caused by a huge expansion in economic activity, the grant of contracts for war-related works, the need to deal with emergencies, the urgency of keeping the supply lines open, and the exercise of discretionary powers by a vastly swollen bureaucracy. We have been debating anti-corruption strategies throughout the past 68 years while corruption has been increasing by leaps and bounds.

Pakistan began its anti-corruption drive soon after its independence. It had on its statute book the Prevention of Corruption Act that was adopted in March 1947 and designed to fight corruption in services. A new law, the Public Representative Offices Disqualification Act (PRODA), was enacted to deal with wrongdoers among holders of elective offices. Both measures failed because the establishment used them selectively -- to punish its opponents and shield its favourites.

The anti-corruption law was never repealed despite the common jokes about its application only to patwaris, junior clerks, and foot constables. But PRODA was repealed amidst the Constituent Assembly’s unsuccessful effort to thwart a predatory governor-general’s march towards despotism. The speeches made in support of the move to repeal PRODA are perhaps still worth reading.

The process of inventing drastic methods to hold the corrupt to account has continued by fits and starts. The bureaucrats survived the selective purges carried out by Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan, Z.A. Bhutto, and Ziaul Haq and the politicians survived the arbitrary use of Ayub Khan’s Elected Bodies Disqualification Order (EBDO) and the martial law regulations of Ziaul Haq.

The 1990s witnessed a series of initiatives for establishing a powerful and independent institution to ensure accountability. A new Ehtesab Commission, headed by Justice (retd) Ghulam Mujaddid Mirza as the Chief Ehtesab Commissioner, was set up. It did not receive due support from the establishment. In 1996, both the main political parties, Pakistan People’s Party (then in power) and Pakistan Muslim League-N (the leading opposition party) drafted their separate accountability bills and the difference between them sheds light on the principal cause of the failure of all accountability efforts. The PPP wanted the accountability period to include the Zia years while the PML-N wanted the period to begin with the formation of the first Benazir government.

General Musharraf decided the matter, quite arbitrarily of course, by making his National Accountability Ordinance of 1999 -- one of his first legislative measures after usurping power -- retrospectively enforceable since January 1, 1985. This meant excluding the Zia dictatorship from the accountability process and including in it the entire period when the country was nominally governed by civilian prime ministers (Muhammad Khan Junejo, Benazir Bhutto, and Nawaz Sharif).

It did not take Gen. Musharraf long to start fighting shy of across-the-board accountability. The result was that the head of the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), the widely respected Gen. Amjad, resigned in disgust and the institution and anti-corruption effort suffered a grievous setback.

The present NAB chief received laudatory notices for his efforts to reactivate the NAB machinery. He claimed distinction for sending 206 references to the courts in 2014 as against 135 in 2013, raising the number of inquiries in 2014 to 587 (from 247 a year earlier), and recovering Rs4.5 billion in a single year. He had just finished chirping about his national strategy against corruption and the inclusion of a chapter on this curse in the 11^th five-year plan, prepared by the Planning Commission when he was taken to task by the prime minister for "exceeding his mandate". Now a direction-less debate is going on about ways to curtail NAB’s powers, and suggestions are being put forth for a new accountability mechanism.

The conclusion from this resume is that the accountability campaigns have failed because the motto each government has followed is: We are honest, the others are dishonest.

Now there is some substance in the prime minister’s complaint that the NAB staff harasses and humiliates its quarries. The charge cannot be denied. The fact is that this is part of the tradition of demonising the targets of state action that began in 1958 and was continued by the Bhutto, Zia and Musharraf regimes, when political opponents and loan defaulters were paraded in chains in public and subjected to violence in prison.

The way Bhutto and Akhtar Mengal were humiliated in the courtrooms and Justice Iftikhar Chaudhary in public should be fresh in public memory. Nawaz Sharif can hardly forget the humiliation he suffered at the hands of Musharraf’s gendarmes. This kind of high-handedness must stop. Nobody in any situation can be deprived of the dignity of person that Article 14 of the constitution guarantees.

The second question is whether there is anything wrong with the accountability law? The answer is: probably yes. The biggest problem with it is that NAB’s autonomy/independence is interpreted as its freedom from accountability. Like all autonomous institutions, it should enjoy independence in carrying out its mandate but it must be accountable to somebody and that body can only be the parliament.

Read also: NAB the Punjab

There is some criticism about NAB’s staff recruitment policies, the professional groups they are chosen from, and the antecedents of its senior functionaries. This surely needs to be looked into. Accountability can follow civilised ways of dealing with civil offenders and it does not have to look like a military operation or the police pastime of extra-legal killings.

Suggestions have been made that a federal accountability institution should not probe matters lying in the domain of provinces or the conduct of provincial authorities. An obvious corollary is the demand for provincial accountability commissions. The issues raised in this debate need to be thrashed out in detail as something can be said on both sides of the suggestions for provincial autonomy in this area. Such matters demand extended and dispassionate deliberation and haste in rushing to conclusions must be avoided.

A fair resolution of the issues raised over the past few weeks should be the creation of a commission comprising parliamentarians, judicial experts, lawyers, and civil society representatives to examine the NAB law, plug the holes that allow the bureau wide discretionary powers, rewrite staffing policies, provide for oversight, external as well as internal, and make accountability to the parliament (and not only to head of state/government) mandatory.

While on this subject one may draw the government’s attention to what is sometimes described as legalised corruption -- from allotment of land to civil and military officers, sanctioning of outsized post-retirement perks and allotment of plots to state notables in housing colonies. These favours amount to bribery and favouritism and encourage the larger body of state employees to grab illegally what has been made legal for the favoured few.

Besides, the area of corruption created by discretionary use of state funds needs to be critically looked into. In a recent write-up, Dr Farrukh Saleem asserted that during 2009-2015 the "budgets had a built-in cumulative discretionary allocation of Rs6.7 trillion," or about one trillion rupees a year. This is one of the largest fountainheads of corruption in Pakistan, a land where those in power do not hesitate to seduce the champions of transparency.

It may not be a bad idea to dig up the Cornelius Report of the 1960s that came in the wake of the Fulton Report of Great Britain and said something about the evil of discretionary powers that is valid to this day.