Saturday, April 27, 2019

Political science theorists whose well-meaning suggestions prioritized the optimum over the workable

From Small Wars, Faraway Places by Michael Burleigh. Page 306.
There was nothing akin to the Congress party in Pakistan and unlike India, which broadly made do with the governing structure it had inherited from the Raj, the tribalist political factions in Pakistan could not even agree how the country should be governed. It took almost a decade to devise a constitution, perhaps because they sought the advice of American political science theorists from the Dearborn Foundation, whose well-meaning suggestions prioritized the optimum over the workable. Although Pakistan was technically a democracy, elections were rare and political legitimacy elusive. Its corrupt civilian politicians were despised by an efficient army, whose rituals and uniforms would not have seemed alien in Surrey or Wiltshire. The fundamental problem was that Pakistan came into existence as an Islamic state and the vast majority of the people were conservative and religious – yet the Western-educated feudal elite was secular, as it remains today.

No comments:

Post a Comment