Time to dispel the myth of technocracy

Somewhere deep in the Pakistani psyche there is the unshakable belief that all this country needs to progress is a few honest men, that if only the right leader and the right experts can be found, we will magically transform into Denmark tomorrow.

This idea is not just nonsense, it is nonsense upon stilts.

Politics is an inherently messy business. Complaining about the messiness or dirtiness of politicians is like complaining about the dirtiness of coal miners. Take a “clean” person and put him into politics. That person will then inevitably become “dirty,” just like a man clad in spotlessly white clothes will become grimy if forced to dig coal.

Note that I am not saying all politicians are dishonest crooks. And I am most certainly not trying to denigrate what politicians do. What I am saying is that the job of a politician is to both represent and reconcile the various desires of the electorate. People want low taxes, beneficent welfare services, flawlessly functioning public utilities and every other desire under the sun. People also want their elected representatives to be perfectly neutral with respect to third parties, but nonetheless listen to their own individual grievances with full attention.

This is not just a thankless job; it is a practically impossible job. No matter what you do as a politician, the chances of people getting upset over your every move are 100 percent. As Thomas Jefferson once complained: “Every time I give somebody a job, I create nine enemies and one ingrate.”

A large part of what is deemed to be “dirtiness” in a politician therefore stems from the very nature of their work. It is the job of a politician to meet with constituents. It is the job of a politician to represent their interests. It is the job of a politician to be accessible. None of that is savory work. It cannot be done in ivory-tower isolation. It requires getting into the muck of everyday life and actually dealing with people who might believe in perfect fairness as a theoretical construct, but would meanwhile like you to have their neighbor arrested and thrashed for playing music too loud. When it comes to politicians, dirtiness is not a bug: It is a feature.

Corruptibility, on the other hand, is a whole different problem. Obviously, corruption is a bad thing. Trying to be a competent representative, without succumbing to the ever-present opportunity to become corrupt, is precisely what makes politics difficult. Some people succeed in this task. Many do not. And by “people,” I not only mean Pakistani politicians but politicians the world over.

However, there are two ways of solving this problem of embracing political accessibility while avoiding corruption. The democratic option is to let politicians be politicians but then to police the hell out of them. The technocratic option is to put anti-social, disengaged, supposedly clean people in charge and pray that they remain uncorrupted.

The latter option requires a massive leap of faith. To reiterate, the assumption underlying the demand for a technocratic regime is that people who have remained uncorrupted until now will continue to avoid corruption even after being thrust into power. This assumption is ridiculous.

To begin with, Pakistan’s history is replete with instances of where one democratic system or another was swept away with much fanfare, only for the new system to be subsequently revealed as equally corrupt. I am old enough to remember the days of Gen. Zia-ul-Haq, when Time magazine had supposedly printed a list on which seven of the 10 most corrupt generals in the world were Pakistani.

The argument for technocracy makes no sense even in an abstract form. Doing politics is a skill. Doing politics well and in a non-corrupt form is a very rare skill. Why drop novices into such a notoriously difficult job, especially when they have no track record of being able to handle the temptations that power brings? Admittedly, many of the candidates secretly imagining themselves in sherwanis have no shortage of virtue. But these pretenders are like the chorus girl in the stage musical “Show Boat” who laments, “I got virtue but it ain’t been tested.”

A further problem with technocrats is that their achievements tend to be written on water. When Gen. Pervez Musharraf took over in 1999, his team came up with a number of good ideas, many of which were long overdue. But when Musharraf disappeared into the sunset, so did many of his purported achievements (see, for example, his vaunted local government scheme.)

By comparison, the Zardari regime set new records for corruption (or at least the public perception of governmental corruption). But despite this handicap, the proudest achievements of the PPP remain solidly entrenched today. The Benazir Income Support Program has received governmental support from the PML-N. And the devolution introduced by the 18th Amendment remains a cornerstone of our modern politics. Even the recently announced Bajwa Doctrine was forced to beat a strategic retreat after a supposedly “off the record” briefing hinted that the army was not happy in relation to these two issues.

Our politics has become so polarized that we tend to forget the distance we have covered. Over the past decade, we have had almost 10 years of uninterrupted democratic governance. Yes, our democracy remains guided and confined in many ways. Yes, our leaders remain imperfect. But those are issues to be worked out over time.

Now is not the time to throw away all we have achieved. If you don’t like your current leaders, please vote them out. But stop dreaming about a technocratic utopia. Been there, done that and failed repeatedly.

— Feisal Hussain Naqvi is an advocate of the Supreme Court of Pakistan. He is a graduate of Princeton University and Yale Law School.

Twitter: @laalshah