Khaled Ahmed
A ray of light shines through, this time because of the villainous pragmatism of the politician who knows which way he has to go while mouthing inanities in response to the \'mandate\' of the 2008 elections
For the first time, democracy looks like coming into its own in Pakistan. There are many reasons for thinking like this. But will it deliver?
In the past, elections have been followed by politics of revenge and bad economic performance. Democracy has so far delivered political disorder and bad economics. In contrast, military rule has by and large delivered better internal order and better economic performance. Will it be the same holding pattern in 2008?
There is some reason to think it will be different this time. But recidivism too periodically stares us in the face.
There is no doubt that the Pakistani citizen wants democratic governance, but his indoctrination goes against it. All military governments have been ‘temporary’, deriving their legitimacy from the promise of restoring democracy. But the intelligentsia which sets the political agenda in Pakistan is indoctrinated in certain notions that militate against the creation of suitable conditions for democracy. It is not realised that nationalism, with its over-emphasis on state sovereignty, undermines democracy. Running a democracy in today’s economically globalised world is almost impossible if nationalist agendas are preferred over economic performance.
In much of Southeast Asia and China, a new model of governance is emerging where economic performance and social order compensate for lack of liberal democracy. Because of the region’s reliance on the free market model instead of the old statist one, the world accepts the case made by Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew that free market will lead to democracy. Thus is economic performance elevated above the ideal of democracy. In Pakistan, too more emphasis is being placed on economic performance by those who study it. Economist Shahid Javed Burki leads those who have noted better economic indicators were achieved by military rulers than democrats.
As data becomes more and more easily available, it is easier to write a book on Pakistan’s economy than about its political order. Because it is the economist scrutinising Pakistan more frequently than the political scientist, and because the economists increasingly work on the basis of a single agreed economic model, as opposed to the political scientist still looking for a consensus, it is the verdict of the economist that is readily available and is relied upon. One finds that Pakistan has done badly under democracy, starting with its first unruly decade, followed by the interregnum of nationalisation under Bhutto and the decade of “lost years’ of the 1990s at the end of which the world began to talk about Pakistan as a ‘failed state’.
Because of the rise of the economist as the arbiter of current history, poverty reduction became the new yardstick in retrospect, judging the eras of General Ayub and General Zia as more successful. To anyone looking at Pakistan from the economic angle, there was more disorder than development in the country under democracy; and elections looked like precursors of disagreement and violence rather than a solvent of conflict. The Bhutto interregnum, which was representative and statist because of its pledge of redistributive reforms, looks oppressive and economically crippling. Because of its additional disadvantage of international isolation, it is today rated the worst period in Pakistan’s history.
The period of democracy in the decade of the 1990s is often misinterpreted. It was strictly a period of military tutelage safeguarding the jihad of General Zia and consolidating the India-driven textbook nationalism that originally awarded supremacy to the army in Pakistan. The Zia-versus-Bhutto legacy in Pakistan was a polarisation that had politicians arrayed on both sides of the divide, which made the insertion of the destabilising Article 58/2/B in the Constitution possible. Politics was judged on the yardstick of hatred of India and support to Kashmir jihad. Revenge masqueraded as accountability and governments were toppled as the economy suffered.
But, significantly, something else also began to happen. The rightwing Muslim League, after usurping the agenda of the army, began to challenge the generals in their own bailiwick. Its last government fell when it was in the process of dismissing two army chiefs in a row. It checkmated them with its testing of the nuclear device in 1998 and what it meant to the common mind in relation to Pakistan’s India-driven nationalism. But what followed was educative.
In India the government that tested the device, the BJP, immediately won its next election. In Pakistan the government that tested the device was removed in 1999 and the prime minister who tested the device was arrested and given a life sentence by an anti-terrorism court. In India the scientist Dr Abdul Kalam who provided the delivery backup to the bomb was made president of the republic. In Pakistan the ‘father of the bomb’ was bunged into house arrest. Pakistan that aimed to lean on the deterrence of the bomb to stage its cross-border adventure in Kashmir had to eat the humble pie, ban the warrior priests fighting its self-destructive jihad, and turn on the Taliban government it was secretly using as proxy. It had to run the gauntlet of UN Security Council resolution 1373 under Chapter Seven that it could rebuff only at the risk of attracting crippling sanctions.
The decade of democracy of the 1990s – if it can be called that – was abysmal in economic performance. But in some ways it was to be a factor in the transformation that we see in Pakistan today. Democracy in 2008 – born of the February elections deemed as clean as those of 1970 – is no longer pegged to an India-driven nationalism demanding a just war. The supremacy of the army is at an end because for the first time the army itself doesn’t see any threat to Pakistan’s sovereignty from India. The establishment in Islamabad is telling the politicians that threat is internal and is coming from South Waziristan. Do the politicians believe that?
This is where the first complication arises. Because of the reversals suffered by the army in the Tribal Areas, and the success of the psychological warfare unleashed by Al Qaeda through its suicide-bombers, most people believe that the threat is not from within but still from without, this time from the western border instead of the eastern border. And the threat is located in Afghanistan in the shape of the United States! Once again the national economy is under threat from isolationist thinking, because of its increased globalised content. Buffeted by the radicalism of incensed public opinion and mutual discord over ‘accountability’ of the army, the politicians may not be able to guard the national economy against harm.
Yet a ray of light shines through, this time because of the villainous pragmatism of the politician who knows which way he has to go while mouthing inanities in response to the ‘mandate’ of the 2008 elections. Pakistan might yet be saved and may actually progress by ignoring what the people want and by listening to the relentless realism of the national economy. COURTESY THE FRIDAY TIMES.
http://www.thefridaytimes.com/06062008/page8.shtml