The Wound That Never Healed: A Memoir of Honesty, Insubordination, and the Planning Commission

Disclaimer: This writing is not motivated by malice against any individual. It is an honest effort to record my own memories and experience while serving at the Planning Commission of Pakistan, in the hope that the nation may learn something from what I went through. Where I name individuals or institutions, I do so because this is my testimony of events I lived through, to the best of my memory, not a work of fiction.

I.

I was seven years old when East Pakistan separated and became Bangladesh. That was the first wound. For decades I believed nothing could come close to it. I was wrong. The second-most tragic event of my life happened to me quietly, inside an office, with no war and no headlines — and I have never written it down until now, eighteen years later.

Every year, when the federal budget is presented and the Public Sector Development Program (PSDP) is announced, the old wound opens again. I am not writing this to seek revenge or to settle a score. I am writing it because carrying it silently has become a burden on my conscience, and because I believe this country can still learn something from it — about what honesty costs in our system, and about why ordinary citizens have stopped trusting the state with their taxes.

1. What the Planning Commission Was Supposed to Be

The Planning Commission of Pakistan was established on July 8, 1952, building on the Development Board created in 1948. Its purpose was to be the apex think tank of the state — preparing national plans, allocating resources, and steering the country’s economic and social development. It had its golden periods: the 1960s and early 1970s, and again between 2002 and 2008, when Dr. Akram Sheikh, a respected national engineer, led it. I worked there during those years, and I believed in what the institution was meant to do.

The PSDP itself exists to drive the country’s socioeconomic uplift — financing infrastructure, human capital, and poverty reduction. I dedicated years of my working life trying to make that promise real, to make sure that public money spent on these projects actually reached the people it was meant for, without being eaten away by cost overruns, delay, and theft.

III. June 2008

In June 2008, Salman Faruqui took over as head of the Planning Commission. By then he had already spent over four decades in the corridors of bureaucratic power — having joined the civil service in 1962, served as Additional Secretary to Prime Minister Junejo, Secretary to Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, head of fourteen federal divisions, Secretary-General to the President for five years, and chairman or CEO of institutions including PTCL, NHA, NESPAK, NPCC, and others. He had received Pakistan’s highest civil award, the Nishan-i-Imtiaz, for public service. He went on to serve as Federal Ombudsman until 2017 — a tenure the Supreme Court took suo motu notice of in June 2013. By any measure, he was one of the most powerful and longest-serving civil servants in Pakistan’s history.

A few weeks after he arrived, he gave a verbal order — not written, because men like him understood exactly what a written order could cost them later. The order was to re-award a contract: the Up-gradation of the Pakistan Planning and Management Institute (PPMI) under the PSDP, valued at Rs. 841.4 million. The contract had already been legally awarded to National Construction Limited (NCL Pakistan), a state-owned enterprise under the Ministry of Housing and Works. He wanted it re-awarded to a private contractor — a close friend of his.

1. The Summary

I was the in-charge Director. I was summoned, along with his self-selected rhinoceros-type or boxer-style DG, and Faruqui himself attended. I went back to my desk and did the only thing I knew how to do: I wrote the truth in black and white. A contract already and legally awarded to a state-owned company could not, under government rules of business, simply be transferred to a private party on a verbal instruction. To do so would be a severe violation of procedure.

That summary landed like a bomb inside the Commission. People didn’t treat it as an act of professional duty — they treated it as an act of self-destruction. I felt the pressure from seniors and colleagues alike, all telling me, in their own ways, to fold. I didn’t change a word. Instead, I wrote directly to the Chairman.

1. The Day I Was Made to Wait

I was summoned to his office at 8:00 a.m. He did not see me. I sat outside that office until 5:00 in the afternoon. I understood, even as it was happening, that the waiting itself was the punishment — a way of being made small before a word was even spoken. Eventually, senior members came and walked me in.

By then, the stories about him inside the Commission had taken on an almost supernatural quality — that he could read a man’s thoughts, that he knew the financial details of citizens across the country from memory, that nothing escaped him. Whether or not I believed any of that, I remember the feeling of walking into a room built to remind you of how small you were. There was no chair for me. He sat above, and I stood.

He did not let me speak first. He shouted. He told me I didn’t know who I was talking to — that he had been Chief Justice, President, Prime Minister, all in effect, and that men like me were less than peons to men like him. At some point he was shouting so violently that he knocked a jug of water to the floor in anger. He ordered that I be handed over to the FIA, to the Rangers, to the FC, for court-martial.

I told him, as calmly as I could manage, that I was prepared to be court-martialed. He shouted for me to be taken out of his office, that I would burst his brain if I stayed. THREE VETERAN JOURNALISTS — IMTIAZ GUL, ANSAR ABBASI, AND RAUF KLASRA — WERE AWARE OF WHAT HAPPENED TO ME THAT DAY. I CARRY THAT AS SOME SMALL COMFORT: THAT THIS WAS NOT ONLY MY WORD AGAINST SILENCE.

1. What I Tried to Build

I did not stop at the summary. I wrote an op-ed in an English daily on the need for transparency in public spending, which I’m told created real turbulence in the corridors of power. But the idea I am proudest of, the one I still believe could have changed something fundamental, was a web-based real-time monitoring system for PSDP projects — a platform I called “Good Governance dotcom.”

The idea was simple: any stakeholder, including the ordinary public, could log in from anywhere and see, in real time, the actual status of a development project — labour, equipment, material use, identified inefficiencies, delays — instead of waiting for an audit years after the money was already gone and the people responsible had moved on, or out of the country. I believed then, and I still believe now, that this kind of real-time visibility was the only real defence against the chronic cost overruns that have crippled projects like the Kachhi Canal (from Rs. 32 billion to Rs. 80 billion) or the Neelum-Jhelum hydropower project (from an estimated Rs. 15.3 billion in 1989 to roughly Rs. 508 billion).

When I sent the link to that website, along with my op-ed, to the Chairman’s office, I was told his reaction was felt throughout the whole building. The matter eventually ended with my resignation — on the condition that the procurement rules would not be changed. I gave up my position to protect those projects from being diverted. After I left, the website was shut down. My laptop was confiscated and never returned.

If Ahsan Iqbal, the current Chairman of the Planning Commission, ever reads this: I am still asking for my laptop back. It was never evidence of wrongdoing. It was the only physical trace left of an idea I believed could have served this country.

VII. What It Cost, and What It Didn’t Change

The system of reactive accountability that exists in Pakistan today — PAC, PPRA, the audit department, NAB, and the rest — still works the same way it did then: investigating after the actors have already gone home, or fled abroad. None of these bodies has the power, or perhaps the will, to stop theft while it is happening. A real-time mechanism remains, in my view, the only way to close that gap.

I have never been able to make policymakers understand why ordinary people — shopkeepers, factory owners, anyone paying tax in this country — don’t trust the state with their money. People ask, plainly: where does our tax go? When indirect taxes like the petroleum levy feel less like a civic duty and more like a colonial-era toll, that question only grows louder.

I do not believe what happened to me in 2008 was an isolated personal injustice. I believe it was one small, specific moment where this country’s economic trajectory could have bent toward transparency, and instead bent away from it — toward the slow decline that has, over the years that followed, left Pakistan closer to being what people now call a global begging bowl.

VIII. Closing

I hold no regret for what I did. I would do it again. My only lasting grievance is this: that a man who built and protected a system of unaccountable power was, in the end, decorated for public service and appointed as the nation’s federal ombudsman — the very office meant to protect citizens from the abuse of power he himself exercised against me.

I am writing this now, eighteen years later, not for revenge, and not for pity. I am writing it because silence has its own cost, and I have carried this one long enough. If this account helps even one young officer somewhere in this country choose to write the truth in black and white when it would be easier to fold — then the wound will, finally, have been worth something.

The Appeal. A humble appeal to Salman Faruqui—the architect often described as the progenitor of Pakistan’s IPP regime, an era that ultimately reduced a sovereign nation to economic dependency.

In our recent communications just a few days ago, I reminded him of my vow: to meticulously document the true nature of his “glorious services” to the Pakistan envisioned by Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Even today, years after the publication of his memoir, Dear Mr. Jinnah: 70 Years in the Life of a Pakistani Civil Servant, he remains a remarkably active and influential figure.

Because of this enduring influence, he is uniquely positioned to author a sequel. While it is not my place to presume to advise a man of his standing, I would highly suggest he pen a definitive, masterly guide on the intricate mechanics of white-collar crime within the corridors of governance. Truthfully, no one possesses a more intimate, sophisticated understanding of this subject than he does.

Writing such an exposé would perhaps be his ultimate service to Pakistan and the global community—and, indeed, the only genuine penance left for him to honour the fractured legacy of the Great Jinnah.