Thread by @IlhanNiaz

Exactly 60 years ago, Pakistan’s Pay & Services Commission constituted by the Ayub Khan regime submitted its detailed report. The chair of the commission was Supreme Court Justice A. R. Cornelius, known for resisting extraconstitutional interventions in the 1950s. 1/15 #History

You can get my paper “The Lost War for Specialisation: Pakistan’s Higher Bureaucracy in the 1960s and 1970s” for more on this report, for free, here: 
academia.edu/40248095/The_L… 
But back to the main thread. 2/15

The Commission reviewed some 600 memoranda, held 155 meetings, & interviewed 150 administrative heads over the course of nearly three years of deliberations. Its report marked the beginning of what became Pakistan’s lost war for specialization in its administrative services. 3/15

the British Raj’s preference for general administrators concentrated in the Indian Civil Service was understandable. The British needed a small, clean, efficient, status-quo oriented, bureaucratic leadership that could preside over a large state. 4/15

Pakistan’s leaders wanted to set the country on the path of industrialisation & development. In this modernisation process, history taught us that the role of the state is absolutely vital. So, how a state organizes itself is a key ingredient in the modernization recipe. 5/15

under the tutelage of American advisers, whose ineptitude was matched only by their confidence backed up by the ability to make it rain dollars, Pakistan’s leaders expanded the role of the Civil Service of Pakistan (the successor to the ICS, aka DMG/PAS). 6/15

The Commission thought that this approach was wrong and that effective administrative support to modernization required building a specialized, subject-based, bureaucracy, with self-contained hierarchies with integration between field and headquarters at the ministry level. 7/15

instead of recruiting the bureaucratic leadership primarily from one service (the CSP), 🇵🇰 needed specialized services for all areas of national life that the state wished to intervene in, with the top cadres in those sectors recruited from within their field of expertise. 8/15

“general recommendation that specialized functional services should be developed, & that superior posts in the secretariat should be integrated with their relevant field services” as the Commission put it. 9/15

The CSP, who provided 9/10 of Pakistan’s federal secretaries, were not amused as this would see them reduced to the leadership of a handful of departments (like Establishment or Cabinet Division), & lose Revenue, Finance, Interior, Education, Health, etc., to specialists. 10/15

Pakistan’s ruler, General Ayub Khan, though a military officer who could clearly understand why it was not a good idea to appoint an Admiral to lead an Armored Corps, had other problems. 11/15

Ayub Khan had set up a rakish Basic Democracies system whose objective was to deprive Pakistanis of democracy while manufacturing some basic popular legitimacy for himself. 12/15

Cornelius’s plan would, by ending the hegemony of the CSP at the field and secretariat level, make it much harder to manage the doling out of patronage (and arm twisting) that this Basic Democratic system depended on. 13/15

So, between the vested interest of the CSP & regime’s political expediency, the Commission’s report was shelved, Ayub Khan basked for a few more years in the glow of a Decade of Reform/Development, that exploded into violence, civil war, and the secession of East Pakistan. 14/15

the PPP government that took over in Dec 1971 was even less interested in what the 1962 Commission had to say. Instead, it charted a course towards an overtly politicized & unprofessional civil service structure geared to keep a few powerful people happy. END