Towards the middle of 1974, when I was serving as a distner magistrate in Sheikhupura, I received an unusual visitor. The gentleman, in army uniform, introduced himself as Lt.Col. Nisar A. Khan. I offered him a cup of tea and enquired as to what I could do to help him. He was honest and straightforward in making his request. Apparently, his younger brother had been ‘falsely’ involved in a murder case, and the good Colonel wondered whether the ‘accused’ could be released on bail. Lt.-Col. Nisar had obviously been advised well on the forum of redress. During the annual summer vacations of the judiciary, the district magistrate officiated as district and sessions judge only to the extent of handling urgent matters such as bail applications. As politely as possible, I explained to Col. Nisar that the district magistrate was required to act purely as a stopgap arrangement and now that he had discussced the matter with me, it would be inappropriate for me to hear the application. To be fair to him, he did not press the point further, but before leaving he did obterve that civil service officers enjoyed vast powers both on the administrative and judicial sides and theirs was a far better career than that of the Pakistan Army. A few months later I read a notification inducting Lt.-Col. Nisar Ahmad Khan from the army into the District Management Group (DMG).
In 1982, while posted at the Civil Services Academy as deputy director in charge of the District Management Group (DMG Programme) for the ninth common group, I was informed by the director general that we would be receiving three more probationers from the army over and above those already inducted for the course. The next day, Majors Qamar-uz-Zaman Chaudhary, Iftikhar Ali Shah, and Nadeem Manzoor joined the group. Major Qamar had served as ADC of President General Ziaul Haq; Major Iftikhar was a nephew of Lt.-Gen. Fazal-e-Haq (Governor of NWFP); and Major Nadeem Manzoor, the son-in-law of Lt.-Gen. K.M. Arif (Chief of Staff to General Ziaul Haq). Although these officers made an ostensible effort to show that they wished to be treated like the rest of their batch mates, it was obvious to everyone that they were very special individuals, given their ‘connections’ with the top brass of the military government. I was to learn later that these officers had been given special seniority which enabled them to bypass several senior batches.
……….
In the Punjab, Chief Minister Nawaz Sharif also decided to carry out a ‘lateral entry operation’, though on a limited scale by inducting a few army officers into the Provincial Civil Service (PCS). He was not deterred by the fact that the West Pakistan Civil Service (Executive Branch) Rules 1964 did not allow such inductions. All he had to do was to ‘relax’ these rules, which he promptly did to induct his personal staff officers (PSOs) Lt.-Col. Sultan Haider, Major Shahnawaz Badar, Major Mohammad Aamir and Major Sajid Mohammad Khan into the PCS. Later, Colonel Mohammad Saleem, chief pilot of the chief minister’s aircraft, was also inducted into the provincial service. The PCS Welfare Association turned out to be less submissive than its DMG counterpart, and at least had the courage to question these decisions in the Lahore High Court, albeit unsuccessfully. Mian Manzoor Ahmed Wattoo, another chief minister of Punjab, viewed his powers to relax rules even more broadly. He selected Salman Ejaz, a son of the Lahore High Court chief justice and an employee of Pakistan International Airlines, for appointment into the PCS. Again a challenge was mounted in the Lahore High Court and again it met with failure as the petitioners had not taken into account the stark reality that the inductee was a son of a senior Judge!
