NEW DELHI: The much-maligned Indian bureaucracy got a pat on its back from its rival, the Pakistan Army, which called its own babus and generals “shady” and “inconsistent”. In its top-secret Green Book, the Pakistan Army slams its generals-turned-rulers by calling Ayub Khan a ‘laissez-faire leader’, Yahya Khan an ‘impoverished leader’ and Pervez Musharraf a general who couldn’t go beyond autocratic rule.
The Green Book says that in India, “bureaucratic stream supports the executive... In India, a combination of intellectuals, businessmen and hereditary leadership rules the masses. The democratic system has evolved and matured rapidly. Soon after Independence in 1947, politicians began to view the military with suspicion as the last supporters of the British Raj, so not only kept it isolated from influencing decisions and policies, but also fully subordinated to political leadership and bureaucracy.”
While defining its own bureaucracy, the book says ‘it is shady’, its leadership attribute is ‘inconsistent’ and executive power is ‘vacillating’. It complimented the Indian leadership development, saying “it has been systematic” while in Pakistan, “it is informal with weak civil control”. Interestingly, the Green Book notes that “bureaucratic leadership has played a partisan role instead of standing up for principles”.
“Mistrust between the three streams — political, bureaucratic and military — has never been addressed by Pakistan. It affects the desired harmonised efforts at the top tier,” it says.
“The political structure of Pakistan could not take roots... Where political leadership was unable to charter a course for themselves, a more organised and trained military bureaucracy started filling in the gaps. This was by no means a sound arrangement but a need of the hour nevertheless,” it says. There is no love lost between the political establishment and army. The Book calls the political system immature, noting that the “political leadership has not been able to develop as other streams. Reason for the shortcomings has been the absence in the present political framework of...a system of checks and balances on the leadership”.