The president in town | Pakistan | News | Newspaper | Daily | English | Online
The president in town
By M. A. Niazi | Published: January 22, 2010
President Asif Zardari spent five days in Lahore, where his much-touted Punjab tour took place, with only a one-day trip to Faisalabad justifying the grandiose title of the trip. The trip he was supposed to make to Pakpattan, representing a venture into South Punjab, was cancelled, and proved to be a symbol of the whole tour, which was sacrificed at the altar of security and turned out to be a stay at the Governor’s House, Lahore.
At one level, the visit was reminiscent of the old Royal Progresses. In Europe, in the mediaeval ages, monarchs used to engage on Royal Progr-esses, outside their capitals. One purpose was to inspect those areas outside the capital where they did not normally go, another was to exploit reso-urces which were not brought to the capital. When a king moved, he took along his household, which included what passed for a national administration. In that era, there was little or no distinction made between public and private functions of a monarch, and thus none made between personal servants and what today are ministers and accompanying bureaucrats.
The monarch was supposed to arrange for the feeding and drinking, clothing and salaries of what was a goodly horde. Taxation then was not all that efficient, so the monarch had to feed and pay out of his own pocket. So he travelled around his kingdom, staying where he could at some or the other of his many estates, and where he couldn’t as the guest of some local magnate who could bear the expense. And there was considerable expense, as the host had to entertain not just the monarch but his officials, who travelled with him, and if he had any grown sons, their separate households, complete with officials. The monarch even travelled with furniture because when he was thrown on his own resources, he had to furnish a royal home (usually, but not always, a castle). He would stay at his estate until his household had devastated the surrounding countryside. When it was no longer possible to feed the household, it was time to move on. This changed as the bureaucracy (and thus the ministers) became entrenched in the capitals, and the Progresses came to a halt. European constitutional monarchs, not being any longer responsible for the administration of their kingdom, also no longer had any need to inspect. The tradition of Royal Progr-esses was known in the subcontinent, because of the type of administration run by the Mughals, who also moved on a circuit of a few forts, such as the ones at Lahore, Delhi (the capital) and Agra.
When the British came, they continued the tradition of the Progress, though now this was made by a viceroy, whose very title showed that he was a substitute for the monarch. The development of the telegraph meant that communication was possible wherever the viceroy was, and thus it created a much firmer grip for the centre over the provinces, and even downwards, than the Mughals ever enjoyed. However, even Indian Progresses became ritualised, and limited to vice regal visits to princely states. The viceroy did most of his travelling on a special train.
When Pakistan and India came into existence, the governor-general was given all the appurtenances of the old viceroy, who was actually the governor-general given the higher title after 1857, when East India Company rule was replaced by direct Crown rule, and the English monarch also assumed the title of Emperor of India. Thus the governor-generals of both the new dominions not only enjoyed the protocol of the old viceroys, but also the considerable powers under the Government of India Act, which was the constitutional document for both until they got around to writing their own constitutions.
When Pakistan wrote its first constitution in 1956, it gave the same position to the new president as to the old governor-general, perhaps because the last governor-general was also the first president, Sikander Mirza. Thus the president inherited the same protocol as the governor-general. This suited the military rulers who soon arrived on the scene, but when the then President, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, became prime minister under the 1973 Constitution, he adopted the president’s protocol for the PM, where it remained in the Rules of Business for Muhammad Khan Junejo to adopt, and for his successors, including Ms Benazir Bhutto, to inherit. Thus President Zardari did not get a higher protocol than before, since the PM’s spouse also enjoyed the same protocol as his wife, which was the same as what he got as president. It was protocol that he enjoyed enough to come to the Governor’s House whenever he came to Lahore, and it was from here that he was arrested in 1996, when Benazir’s second term was as abruptly ended as the first, by a presidential dissolution. Though the IJI, not the PPP, was in power in Benazir’s first tenure, and in the second the chief ministry had to be given to the PML-J, in both the governorship was in the power of the PPP to fill, and the Governor’s House was a PPP bastion.
Apart from his desire to get together with Governor Sal-man Taseer, who is a Bhutto biographer, and thus presumably has a fund of stories about his subject which a son-in-law would be anxious to hear, the president will also remember the hugely successful rallies which Bhutto had in Lahore.
Another reason why he came here as president was because he used it as a point of departure and arrival for the crucial negotiations with India to end the 1971 war. Zardari would remember all of these occasions, for his father Hakim Ali was a PPP MNA at this time, and this on the periphery of these events. However, the president did not repeat his father-in-law’s successes. Bhutto had used his visits to Lahore, or rather to the Punjab, as opportunities to get in touch with the party faithful. Zardari could not manage even this, and certainly played no role in his governor’s pet project, of converting the Punjab into a Larkana. Even in Lahore, the party cadres were insulted at the gate of the Governor’s House, even though Zardari was in Lahore more as their co-chairman than as President of Pakistan, supposed under the constitution to be a symbol of the federation. This was done in the name of security, which also led to the cancellation of the Pakpattan leg of the tour.
President Zardari also does not need to engage in Progr-esses, because the presidency can support the president, his functions and his bureaucracy. However, the presidency can function outside the federal capital, as shown by the reception of a foreign visitor. That the visitor was another junke-teering American who was a left-handed compliment to the resilience of Pakistan, which can fight the USA’s War on Terror even though its president was out of his capital.