By Cyril Almeida
MEMORIES can be tricky sometimes, so let’s take a trip down memory lane.
“The chief minister was in a strident mood. He made it clear that the agitation launched by the MRD but actually spearheaded by the PPP would not be allowed to succeed. He reminded us (Punjab commissioners) that there was a long queue of officers waiting to become commissioners, DIGs, deputy commissioners and SPs and that anyone found less than enthusiastic about the ‘political’ dimension of his work would be shunted out.”
The chief minister in question? Nawaz Sharif.
Yep, the same Sharif who has been urging bureaucrats to follow their conscience and the letter of the law in recent days wasn’t quite so charitable back when he was chief minister of Punjab in 1986.
Aminullah Chaudhry, a bureaucrat who joined the Civil Service of Pakistan in 1967 and rose to the senior ranks of the
bureaucracy until his arrest as one of the ‘hijackers’ of the Musharraf plane in 1999 before turning approver and helping secure a conviction against his patron, Nawaz Sharif, has done all of us a favour by putting in black and white how the bureaucracy has, over the decades, been used and abused by politicians and by cunning and conniving bureaucrats to enhance their wealth and status.
At times, it’s difficult to decide whether Chaudhry’s book, Political Administrators (OUP 2011), makes for prosaic or wretched reading.
“Despite my (Chaudhry’s) best efforts to humour him, the behaviour of Chaudhry Sher Ali, mayor of Faisalabad, became increasingly unbearable … I finally had a detailed talk with him in order to ascertain what his problem was … He was quite frank in admitting that he had ‘invested’ considerable sums of money in the process of getting elected as mayor and he now wished to ‘recoup’ his losses by taking a number of administrative initiatives. He made it a point to highlight his family relationship with the chief minister (Nawaz Sharif) and the fact that he meant to exploit it, if I stood in the way,” writes Chaudhry, who was then commissioner of
