CHAUDHRY Aslam, the notorious encounter cop, died on Jan 9, 2014, in a meticulously planned car bomb attack when suicide bombers rammed their explosives-laden vehicle into his entourage.

On the day he died, Aslam was a deputy superintendent of police, ranked at basic pay scale (BPS) 17. He had, through the course of a controversial career, risen to a much higher rank — that of Senior Superintendent of Police (BPS 19).

For each high-profile target Aslam caught or (more frequently) killed, reward followed by way of head money and sometimes through promotions on the basis of gallantry, as allowed in the Sindh civil service laws at the time.

The service structure we inherited is an iteration of the British project in India, concerned less with service to the local people than it is with service of the self. ‘Your humble servant’ and its like was the messaging through which the East India Company grew its roots in Mughal India.

If you were willing to leave London to serve in the sticky subcontinent, you were rewarded with guaranteed privilege. Our service laws followed suit. Work long enough, stay compliant, and promotions were set in stone. Merit was a concept the colonisers left at home.

The British built tenurial protections into the colonial constitutional structure. When we finally came around to drafting a constitution in 1956, our bureaucracy ensured the protections of service and tenure stayed in.

When terms and conditions of service were finally omitted from the constitution in 1973, legislation which followed to reiterate them hastily acquired hallowed status.

Aslam at grade 19 was hence a doubly sore tooth. Not only was he promoted on the merit of gallant service, he was also a ranker who had risen above and jumped over CSS officers in queue. Challenges to these irregular elevations reached the Supreme Court which in a judgment, authored by Justice Amir Hani Muslim, declared all such promotions and retentions contrary to established civil service legal principles.

The decision upended the bureaucratic hierarchy in the Sindh province, effecting the seniority and promotion tracks of tens of thousands of civil servants by striking down amendments to provincial civil service laws which allowed for promotions based on gallantry.

The SC stated: “The impugned instruments are discriminatory and prejudicial to public interest as such enactments would be instrumental in affecting the civil servant’s tenurial limitations and their legitimate expectancy of future advancement....

“The Sindh government through the impugned legislation have conferred undue favour on a select group of underserving and unmeritorious persons by way of deputation, posting, indu­ction, out of turn promotion, ante-dated seniority, re-hiring.

“The impugned legislation protects and promotes the interests of select group of officers/individuals to the disadvantage of hundreds of thousands of civil servants, depriving them of the equal protection of law under articles 4 and 25 of the Constitution.”

Chaudhry Aslam was reverted to the BPS -17 level of DSP. He lost out on the protective entourage that he had carefully built around himself as SSP and the armoured vehicle he was allotted. The borrowed SUV he was using when attacked proved inadequate.

Even if his gallantry promotions were flawed, why couldn’t Aslam be elevated again? Why can’t the best and the brightest be placed higher on our bureaucratic chain if the government desires it so?

Because our civil service is still structured on the pattern of colonial capture and fixated with the rewards promised for facilitating it.

A forgotten disaster of the Z.A. Bhutto era was his reshaping of the civil service on the ‘Chinese model’. A uniformity of pay grades across all service cadres was introduced, with various unintended consequences. Where there once were hundreds of pay grades for civil and general public service, vaguely commensurate with the private sector where relevant, the new system was to have twenty.

These basic pay scales would become the defining factor of status, regardless of where one served. A doctor’s salary was now equal to a policeman’s who was on the same basic pay scale. In the haggling that followed, two extra grades came about, for the elite civil servant, 21 and later 22. The damage was far-reaching.

Professors opting to work in public universities now began at a pre-determined BPS grade, regardless of their comparative worth had they become private professionals.

The economists working in the finance ministry started off at the same pay-grade as officers administrating prisons. The best minds were no longer financially attracted to serving the people, opting for the private sector (or emigration) instead.

In their place came generations of civil servants to whom job security, status and power related perks were the primary draw.

Rooted in the past

Whilst the world has moved on to competitive salaries pegged to the private sector with dynamic and meritorious performance measurement, along with allowances of short term ventures of private professionals into and from state service, we remain rooted in the past. A bureaucrat is neither paid to nor does he work at market standard. He is promoted on the basis of how long he has spent being uncontroversially suitable, as affirmed by his seniors, until he retires to his last BPS level linked pension at 60.

A civil servant can be retired earlier, or dismissed from service after being afforded an explanation and due process. But attempt to promote a civil servant out of turn, and everyone else will immediately remind the government that there is one thing Pakistanis queue steadfastly for, at least until the day they retire: a promotion.

The legal weight given to seniority cum fitness means every civil servant has a vested right to be considered for a promotion on the basis of his years of service; provided his conformity to the system is reflected in his Annual Confidential Reports, dubbed his ‘fitness’.

So when a government helped people like Aslam jump the queue, people left behind went to court; where being considered for promotion based only on seniority and fitness acquired constitutional protection.

The quality of service or the efficiency of the department you served in, irrelevant. For the rest of us, absent a contractual agreement to the contrary, the extent of one’s job security hangs on the maxim ‘a servant cannot be foisted on an unwilling master’, understood by our courts to mean a month’s salary or notice.

Recently, a larger bench of the SC has been directed to be formulated to consider the Justice Hani Muslim verdict by the CJP after suspending a decision which followed it. The court noted thus: “We do not know how ante-dated promotion could be ultra vires to the constitution and also we are not familiar with the fundamental rights of the civil servants, rather the rights of the civil servants are governed by the Civil Servants Act and the rules made thereunder.”

Chaudhry Aslam died wondering the same thing.

Published in Dawn, July 21st, 2020