Seems to be a fair analysis.
India is surging ahead amidst its myriad of problems,Pakistan is unable to come to terms with itself as a Nation.Sticking to a religious ideology that has been the bane of many a Democracy,looking for phantoms that are out to destroy it, when none is in place,to corrupt politicians( India has its fair share of these specimens),a pathetic people who do not raise their voice though there are a proud and intelligent people with culture.,looking for alms from countries that want Pakistan as a tool in their strategic games,allowing uncultured antediluvian mullahs to rouse passions with wrong interpretations of Islam,allowing an usurper to the highest office,exiled criminals being legally pardoned and allowed to have a decisive say in running the country,Pakistan presents a sad spectacle of a noble dream come unstuck.
Story:
Many Pakistanis are still not prepared to develop the patience required to see democracy through its early, evolutionary stages – especially difficult stages as a result of the violence done to it by military dictatorship after military dictatorship. They still look for and believe in personalities, not for a sustainable and equitable system. Many will tell you that the only cause for all of Pakistan’s woes is “humain aaj tak koi ddhang ka leader nahin mila (we never found a decent leader)”. The observation is correct. But the way we have gone about finding a decent leader has been completely wrong.
A number of Pakistani and even Indian readers may not agree with parts of Steve Coll’s relatively short write-up below. But that is not hugely relevant to the main reason it is being reproduced here. The point that it is meant to highlight is that countries do not necessarily need larger than life heroes to lead them out of trouble. Equally importantly, democracy does not necessarily and need not produce such a perfect specimen. Dull, dreary but adequate will do. The system, if strong, will take care of the rest. Statecraft is not really a one-man job. Democracy is the least bad way of ensuring that, more often than not, the whole might just be greater than the sum of its parts.
Manmohan Singh
By Steve Coll The New Yorker, November 24, 2009
The Indian Prime Minister, who appeared at a joint press conference with President Obama today and who will be fêted at Obama’s first state dinner tonight, is not likely to leave much of an impression on the American public. A few may take passing note of his preference for powder-blue turbans. Otherwise, this Sikh economist and Congress Party technocrat with a sonorous but self-effacing voice normally conducts himself in a way designed not to attract too much attention. Politically, he has been the product of a democratic system in India—and particularly, its ungainly Congress coalitions—that tends to reward consensus builders. Then, too, a democracy as pluralistic and relatively crisis-free as India’s is not the sort of system that will produce outsized leaders, for good or ill—a quality that reflects India’s political and constitutional health.
Singh’s low profile is misleading in important respects, however. His counterparts in the rising Hindu-nationalist movement have made more noise and been more proactive in reshaping post-Cold War Indian politics, but Singh has outlasted them all and will be remembered as a seminal figure of India’s transition from socialism and Soviet-leaning nonalignment to managed capitalism and rising power status. He has in many ways been an indispensable figure in India’s recent transitions. As finance minister during the late, sclerotic socialist period, he quietly helped steer the treasury through various close fiscal calls. He defied political convention and called for India to fight off its anti-colonial hangover, recognize the accumulating failure of its state-run economy, and embrace the opportunities of post-Cold War global trade. During the nineteen-nineties, when the Hindu nationalists rose to power, in large part because of their appeal to the country’s emerging urban business classes, Singh helped hold a fragmenting Congress leadership together, in service of Rajiv Gandhi’s Italian-born widow, Sonia, who embraced the Sikh economist as her political partner. When the Hindu nationalists finally ran out of steam, Singh steered Congress back into power, first in unwieldy alliance with leftist parties, and now, finally, in possession of a solid majority.
It was Singh, more than any individual in India, who was prepared to invest his political career in the pursuit of a transformational peace with Pakistan. It was Singh, after the Mumbai attacks, which came on the cusp of national elections, who had the courage to campaign for reëlection on a platform of steely restraint—and who was rewarded by Indian voters. His record may not stand with the great political figures of our age—Mandela, Gorbachev. In his own country’s history, he certainly does not rank with the Gandhis and Nehrus. Yet he is one of those neglected, careful, seemingly incorruptible, admirable figures that [united] India’s independence movement and democracy have managed to produce regularly.
The Pakistani Experience
Indians, Pakistanis and others come up with all sorts of differences between the two countries in order to explain their increasingly divergent trajectories along the road to stability and, lately, prosperity. To many Indians Pakistan is the country of religious zealots created by the treacherously communal Mohammed Ali Jinnah. To many others Jinnah was simply communal, and the question of treachery did not arise since, according to them, he played no part in India’s independence movement. Both these views have now been ably and successfully countered and discredited by a number of leading scholars.
Emphasis has been added to key parts of the last two lines of Mr Coll’s article to show two important aspects of India and Pakistan. The one about Jinnah, Nehru and Gandhi is the common aspect. However, in Pakistan soon after Jinnah died of natural causes at age 72, constitutionalism and rule of law were murdered in their infancy. What followed was a series of self-appointed messiahs with no legitimate right to rule.
The still-born democracy of Pakistan from the time of Liaquat Ali Khan’s assassination is ultimately the only critical difference between the two countries. Almost none of the other differences are as acute, of course always allowing for differences in size and demography. This is a brief investigation into the critical reason for the disproportionate disparity, not lack of equality. Otherwise both countries have had their share of poverty, even of violence. In India they call it communalism and it has tended to manifest itself in short and intense occasional outbursts of senseless violence. In Pakistan, on the other hand, we call it sectarianism and it has been an ongoing, low-intensity war.
It is this critical difference, of the presence of a more than rudimentary system of rule of law in India that allows some hope that the chief organisers and the occasional high-placed aiders and abetters of such violence might be brought to justice one day. At least there isn’t the case of a dictator like Musharraf arbitrarily letting Ahmed Tariq (founder of Sipah Sahaba) out of prison just so that Musharaf’s own man could be Prime Minister. The Indian judicial system may be inefficient, even incompetent, at places, but it is not without a large degree of freedom and credible levels of fairness. Most importantly, India’s democracy, with all its flaws, offers hope looking to the future.
Perhaps the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the legacies of that war have also been a burden not experienced by our eastern neighbour. But, again, it’s a burden made a thousand times worse by the dictatorship at that time.
In Pakistan, almost 60 years of arbitrary rule of one form or another, punctuated with short, abortive periods of controlled democracy, have never allowed an appreciation of either the reality of politics and of politicians in general, or of the importance and utility of a strong system over ‘great and good’ men of absolute power. A large number of people believe in discriminating between good and bad leaders and not necessarily between legitimate and illegitimate power. It seems that hardly any one is able to appreciate or prepared to accept that as long as there is rule of law and a reasonably robust system of checks and balances, even (suspected) crooks amongst politicians and leaders will do. There is not enough of a realisation that allowing the arbitrary power of a strongman to destroy the system in the irrational hope that he might turn out to be the long-awaited saviour is gambling of the most reckless kind. That it’s suicidal to the extent that it is tantamount to putting aside getting on with all the practical issues, responsibilities and requirements of life and betting on and waiting for a miracle to take care of things instead.
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