By Aflatoon
I have spent a portion of this week reading the civil awards list, which is not a thing I recommend as recreation, but which repays the effort in a way I did not expect.
Three hundred and fifty-five names. Doctors, poets, shooters, a comedian, a naat khawan, several vice chancellors, a squash player, two physicians who attended the Quaid and have been dead for seventy years.
And then, further down, this.
Nazakat Ali. Sepoy Muhammad Usman. Sepoy Mina Badshah. Sepoy Ibrar Ali. Sepoy Noorul Hasan. Sepoy Taza Gul. Lance Naik Muhammad Nazif.
Sitara-i-Shujaat. The star of bravery. All posthumous. All Federal Constabulary — the men who stand at the checkposts, on the roads, in the districts where the convoys get hit.
There are dozens of them. The report says “and several others”, which is a phrase I would like you to sit with, because it is doing a great deal of work. Several others. Men whose names did not fit.
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Higher up the same document, five serving federal ministers have been recommended for the Nishan-i-Imtiaz.
The deputy prime minister. The interior minister. The finance minister. The minister for establishment and economic affairs. The minister of state for finance.
The Nishan-i-Imtiaz is the highest civil award this country can give one of its own citizens.
And here is the machinery, which I looked up so that I would not be unfair to it. Nominations are submitted by ministers and by provincial governments. They go to awards sub-committees, then to the main awards committees, then to the prime minister, who forwards the final names to the president.
So: ministers nominate, committees appointed by the government sift, the prime minister forwards, and the president signs. Somewhere in that chain the names of five sitting members of the cabinet were put forward for the republic’s highest civil honour, and at no point did the chain leave the building.
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Let me be scrupulous, because I can already hear the objection and it is a fair one.
These are not nobodies. Ishaq Dar has been foreign minister through a war in which this country made itself the facilitator of talks between Washington and Tehran, and by the account of the Norwegian foreign minister — who has no stake in flattering us — that has been serious and difficult work. Muhammad Aurangzeb has presided over a period in which the rating agencies upgraded us and the reserves stopped haemorrhaging. Mohsin Naqvi has, whatever else one says about his views on the system, an interior ministry that is not obviously worse than the one he inherited.
I am not saying they have done nothing. I am saying something narrower and, I think, harder to answer.
You cannot grade your own examination.
The distinction between a state honour and a self-congratulation is not the merit of the recipient. It is the independence of the awarder. And there is no arrangement in which a cabinet recommending its own members for the republic’s highest decoration, in office, satisfies that condition. If the work is as good as I have just conceded it might be, it will still be there in 2031, and the award will mean something then.
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But the ministers are not really my subject. My subject is that both things are on the same list.
Somewhere in a file in Islamabad, a page carries the name of a finance secretary proposed for Hilal-i-Imtiaz, and a few pages later the name of a sepoy who was killed at a checkpost and is proposed for a star of bravery he will not be at the ceremony to collect.
The same signature covers both. The same ceremony, next March, will confer both.
I do not think this is cynicism on anybody’s part. I think it is worse than cynicism: it is a filing system. The honours secretariat receives nominations, sorts them by category, and produces a list. The category “gallantry/public service” contains both a man who died and a man who attended meetings, because the form has one box.
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There is one more entry I want to note, because it made me laugh in a way I am not proud of.
Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has been recommended for a Pakistani state honour, one week after signing the defence agreement he helped negotiate.
I have no objection to it whatsoever. He earned it, the pact matters, and this is precisely what state honours are for in diplomacy — they are currency, and everybody knows the exchange rate.
I only observe that we managed to process his nomination in seven days.
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Here is what I would do, and it costs nothing.
Publish the citations. Not the names — the citations. One paragraph for each award saying what the person did.
For Asad Muhammad Khan it will read beautifully and take a page. For the sepoys it will be a sentence, and it will be the most important sentence in the document. And for the ministers, somebody in an office will have to sit down and write out, in specific language, for public reading, what precisely was achieved that merits the highest honour the republic can bestow.
Some of those paragraphs would be a pleasure to read.
I suspect that is why we publish the list without them.
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Aflatoon is a satirist and observer of the Pakistani condition. His column, Intellectual Voices, appears in The Pakistan Daily.
