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| Musharraf's political maneuvering will continue | | | B L KAK
NEW DELHI: God is great. Pakistan President, Gen. Parvez Musharraf, is also great. By his God's grace Gen. Musharraf has just completed seven years as his country's ruler. And seven years after he toppled an elected government, Pakistan finds itself hedged to a political system through which the military controls the nation’s destiny and the generals’ superiority over the elected, civilian leadership has been formalised.
The Army Chief is also the head of state, and he, not the Prime Minister, Shaukat Aziz, heads Pakistan's highest policymaking body — the National Security Council. In theory, of course, there is a democratic system in place — a lower house elected on the basis of universal adult franchise, an upper house representing the federation’s four constituent units, and elected governments at the federal and provincial levels. But all this has come into being not through a normal and fair electoral process but through a series of legal and constitutional decrees promulgated prior to the election in October 2002.
It was an exercise in political maneuvering and constitutional manipulation, the aim being less to secure the people’s participation in governance and more to perpetuate a system in which the military would call the shots. This was done through wholesale amendments in the Constitution in the form of the Legal Framework Order that queered the pitch for the military’s presumed and potential rivals, denied an even playing field to all political parties and groups and ensured the success of those on the military’s right side. An amendment has laid down that no one could become Prime Minister for more than two terms and another has revived the notorious article 58-2b, which authorises the President to sack an elected government and dissolve the Parliament.
There were other rope tricks and contrivances too, like the shibboleth that accountability has become. While the accountability process did indeed catch some big fish, including some retired generals and admirals, it often appeared from the way the accountability laws were applied selectively that the regime was using corruption as a weapon to sort out its opponents. However, the most blatant part of the political witch-hunt on the eve of the last election was the way the military persecuted the two mainstream political parties.
While the PML-N’s top leadership had gone into exile as part of a deal that also involved a friendly country, the PPP found itself at the receiving end of the military’s anti-Bhutto legacy since Zia-ul-Haq's days. The absence of the top leadership of these two mainstream parties from the electoral arena created a vacuum which, as the election results showed, helped obscurantists and regional parties, whose policies and orientation lacked a broad national perspective. The National Assembly that came into being after the October 2002 election was thus open to manipulation. Pakistan's influential English daily, Dawn, commented thus: A rag-tag coalition consisting of politicians known to be corrupt and time-servers became the ruling party, and the bribe of ministerial office and the threat of prosecution for graft helped secure the loyalty of many turncoats.
Four years after the election, Gen Musharraf is still the Army Chief and head of state. He rescinded his promise to shed his uniform on the pretext that the MMA had not kept its part of the bargain by abstaining from a vote of confidence in him in Parliament. That excuse must have come in handy for him, for he has repeatedly said that his continuation as Army Chief was necessary to be able to tackle many of Pakistan's gargantuan problems.
This is flawed logic. No one can solve the nation’s problems except the nation itself through its duly elected representatives. In fact, what constitutes national interests cannot be left to an oligarchy with vested interests; it is the nation’s representatives at various tiers of government, their spokespersons in Parliament and their leaders in the Cabinet who alone are in a position to respond to the hopes and aspirations of their constituents and frame policies that have a nationwide appeal and relevance.
Pakistan is now on the threshold of the next national election. If Pakistan is to qualify as a member of the international community of democratic nations, the elections in 2007 must be truly transparent. Let all parties and politicians contest without any constraints on their unhindered participation in the electoral process. As for corruption, democracy has a built-in, self-correcting mechanism that continually purges itself of base material. Pakistan has the example of neighbouring India which has its share of corrupt politicians and which Transparency International recently called the most corrupt country in the world.
But no government in India has used corruption as a pretext to postpone elections or to subvert the democratic process. There are other countries, too, in Europe, the Far-East and Latin America where corruption scandals have never been allowed to come in the way of the democratic process. Let the Pakistani nation itself conduct grand accountability exercises in the form of fair and free elections at regular intervals and purge itself of corrupt elements in politics.
The year 2007 will mark Pakistan’s entry into the ranks of the democratic nations provided two vital questions are answered in the affirmative: will President Musharraf discard his uniform, and will the military hold a general election that will be truly fair and free?
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