Where’s the respect?
Someone had to say it. And it turned out to be Justice Saqib Nisar of the Supreme Court. The Punjab government runs the province like an imperial fiefdom, His Honour noted while hearing the spurious drugs case of the Punjab Institute of Cardiology. Anyone who has put in any time in the Punjab government during the current government would testify to the fact that all the court is not way off the mark.
In this particular case, Justice Nisar observed how the imperial throne decrees to send a suspension notice to one official after the other.
There seems to be only one weapon in the Punjab chief minister’s arsenal: the suspension letter. There are several reasons for this. For starters, it gets (or at least used to get) good press. This is a direct consequence of, generally, having a vacuous fourth estate. Rather than giving an informed opinion about policy issues, the media chose instead to become giddy schoolgirls every time a high and mighty official bit the dust. Secondly, our thrice-born mandarins actually do, many of them, deserve to be given the boot. These key jobs shouldn’t be green pastures but those of responsible public policy and public interaction. Thirdly, rather than government try to wrap its head around the finer points of public policy, getting rid of a guy and getting another in his place seems much easier to do. And do again.
The bureaucracy in Pakistan should be dealt with in a two-pronged approach. One, unhinge them from their colonial era hang-ups and show them that the elected representatives, and through them, the public is the boss. Two, and this doesn’t run counter to the first point, respect them. They are servants of the state.
The Punjab government is doing the exact opposite: it humiliates them and summarily dismisses them. Yet it is the Secretariat and not the treasury benches MPAs that is running the province.
All is not well at the federal level either. As the SC noted on Monday, scores of law-abiding civil servants were either posted out of key assignments or made OSDs when they refused to toe the line of the federal government. The federal government makes it difficult for civil servants to follow their brief. Article 18 of the Constitution says the civil servants “are bound to follow the lawful orders.” Lawful orders.
Tareek lamhoon k aviz suraj ko bhi thukra doo
Jahan apna ZAMEER apne liye ilzam ban jaye
Observations of the superior court judges well placed but the long exercise of the Service Tribunal appeals,etc make the civil servant almost dead before he eventually gets justice against the arbitrary exercise of authority by the Executives like the CM Punjab.
Comments are closed.