And now we have Mamnoon Hussain

There are presidents and then there are presidents

The issue of appointing the head of state arose on the eve of the partition of India. While neighbouring Bharat agreed to allow Viceroy Mountbatten to hold the governor general’s post till June 1948, All India Muslim League opted to have Jinnah as the country’s first to have the title. After Mountbatten’s exit the post was occupied by Rajgopalachari till January 1950 when India decided to say goodbye to the dominion status and elect veteran Congress leader Rajendra Prasad as its first president.

Pakistan took another six years to become a republic. It remained a part of the British Dominion till the adoption of its first constitution in 1956 when its last governor general Iskander Mirza assumed the title of president.

This was an indication of contrasting political trends in the two neighbouring countries.

The Indian National Congress was spread all over India, had a strong middle class base and several experienced politicians capable of leading the country after independence. The new government soon established control over civil bureaucracy and the army and initiated the task of developing democratic institutions. Unlike Pakistan where a consensus constitution had to wait till 1973, India adopted its constitution in 1950.

As opposed to the United Kingdom where the hereditary sovereign is the head of state, India and Pakistan had to choose their presidents. The type of politics the two countries practiced dictated the type of persons who were appointed to the office.

In India where building of democratic institutions was given priority, presidents were chosen on the basis of their stature. Stature was defined in different ways. One category among the presidents comprised outstanding freedom fighters like Rajendra Prasad and Ramaswamy Venkataraman. Renowned intellectuals and scientists like Dr Sarvepalli Radha Krishnan, Dr Zakir Hussain, and APJ Abdul Kalam fell into another category. Then there were people with wide administrative experience or knowledge of international relations like V V Giri, Shankar Dayal Sharma and Pranab Mukherjee.

Pakistan was an altogether another world. There being no strong political party with countrywide roots bureaucrats took over the reins of power soon after Jinnah and used politicians as pawns. There was no general election till 1971. Recourse was taken to political intrigues to set up and dismiss governments. But for Jinnah and Khwaja Nazimuddin, the governors general were appointed from amongst the bureaucracy. Power gradually shifted from civil bureaucracy to military, Iskander Mirza who was himself a cross between civil and military bureaucracy representing the interregnum. After the 1958 military coup, first Gen Ayub Khan and then Yahya Khan assumed the office of the president. Unlike India the heads of state in Pakistan were much more than ceremonial figures. With the arrival of the military rule all power was concentrated in the hands of the presidents.

Things changed briefly after the 1973 constitution which brought in the parliamentary system with prime minister as the chief executive. The president under the new constitution became a figurehead. Z.A Bhutto sidelined the military and took away the constitutional safeguards available to bureaucracy to put it under the control of the elected government. A PPP loyalist who was a middle class lawyer was elected the first president who was required to act on the advice of the prime minister.

After Ziaul Haq’s military coup in 1977, power again passed into the hands of the president. The constitutional amendments introduced by Zia beat the federal and parliamentary constitution out of shape. The 8th amendment and Article 58 2( b) gave president the power to dismiss the prime minister and the National Assembly.

Ziaul Haq’s sudden death in an accident led Senate Chairman Ghuam Ishaq Khan to step into the shoes of the former military ruler. Now it was a bureaucrat armed with the 8th amendment and Article 58 2(b) During the period of 1988 until 1996, President Ghulam Ishaq Khan made an extensive use of both the constitutional provisions to dismiss the elected governments of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif.

This led the leaders of both the PPP and PML-N to put up as presidential candidates docile party leaders or sympathizers who were expected to act on their instructions. Benazir succeeded in getting PPP leader Farooq Leghari elected President in 1993. Three years later in November 1996 he sent her government packing.

In 1997, the 13th Amendment to the constitution was passed, stripping the president of the power to dissolve the National Assembly and call for new elections. This effectively reduced the presidential powers to dismiss governments at will. The hunch for a pliable president however continued. Like the PPP earlier, the PML-N nominated former Muslim Leaguer Rafiq Tarar for presidency.

This time army chief Pervez Musharraf launched a military coup, jailed the prime minister and assumed the office of the President while retaining the post of the COAS. The 17th amendment which became effective in December 2003 brought back to the president the powers of dissolving the assemblies and the LFO was made part of the constitution.

Soon after the 2008 elections the PPP decided to block the army’s manoeuvres through the president. Thus instead of nominating a party leader to the post Zardari himself decided to become the president while getting Yousuf Raza Gilani elected as prime minister. The arrangement allowed the PPP government tide over periods of tension with the army. The arrangement also allowed the 18th amendment to be passed smoothly. Zardari did not need to be persuaded to surrender the extraordinary powers enjoyed by the president. Zardari however remained the real decision maker throughout the PPP’s latest tenure.

And now we have Mamnoon Hussain as the president of the country. With the federal and parliamentary character of the constitution restored, Nawaz Sharif cannot plead that he opted for a rubber stamp to preclude the possibility of the military establishment using the president to overthrow the elected government. Had a neutral and widely respected figure been nominated for the post, this would have introduced a new trend in the choice of the presidents and brought good name the country.

Leaving aside the generals who assumed the presidency in Pakistan, others happened to be widely experienced individuals in fields related to governance despite their several highly negative tendencies and actions. After Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s death the office of the governor general was occupied by Khwaja Nazimuddin, a graduate of Trinity Hall Cambridge, a member of the All India Muslim League Working Committee and chief minister of Bengal before partition.

Malik Ghulam Muhammad was a chartered accountant who in united India served on the Indian Raliway Board before working as the controller of general supplies and purchase during the World War II. He joined the ministry of finance and in 1946 helped Liaquat Ali Khan who was finance minister of India to draft and prepare the budget. Later he served as Pakistan’s first finance minister.

Fazal Elahi Choudhry was a pre-partition Muslim Leaguer. A member of the Punjab Assembly in 1951, he also represented Pakistan in the UN in1952. Elected in 1956 as member West Pakistan Assembly he was its speaker from 1956-58. In 1970 he was elected to National Assembly on PPP ticket to become speaker of the NA in 1972.

Ghulm Ishaq Khan was the first Chairman of WAPDA and Federal Secretary Finance under Ayub Khan. He was governor State Bank of Pakistan and then defence secretary under Bhutto. He subsequently was finance minister and chairman Senate under Zia before becoming the President

Farooq Leghari was an Oxford graduate and a bureaucrat who was elected to the Punjab Assembly and National Assembly before being elected president in 1993. Rafiq Tarar was chief justice Lahore High Court in 1989-90, a judge of the Supreme Court in 1991-94 and then a senator.

Since 1988 the standards have continued to deteriorate. Mamnoon Hussain marks the nadir.

The writer is a political analyst and a former academic.