in Pakistan
By Mohammad A. Qadeer, Professor Emeritus Queen's University Totonto, Canada
Gen Musharraf has scheduled the promised elections to the national and provincial assemblies for October 10th, 2002.After three years of military rule, Pakistan may be returning to some form of ‘controlled democracy’, in which an elected executive and legislatures will be supervised by the General, who has decreed himself as the President and the military chief for five years, and will be answerable to a new body, the National Security Council, comprised of four chiefs of the military services, the President, Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition .
Gen Musharraf has unilaterally amended the constitution, entrenching the military as the final arbiter of the national authority, tilting the balance of power towards the office of president and emasculating the authority of elected leaders. Many of these constitutional changes reenact past failed experiments of crafting presidential forms of governments that the military prefers. Pakistan is going around the constitutional well once again, searching for a suitable form of government to realize political stability and good governance, which have eluded it in its 55 years history.
The forthcoming elections are being held under stringent new rules, barring politicians tried or convicted for almost any crime, e.g. corruption, non-appearance in a court hearing, unpaid taxes or utility bills or default of bank loans etc., requiring political parties to hold internal elections and submit audited accounts to the National Election Commission and prescribing a college degree as the minimum educational qualification for candidates contesting elections. Many of these rules are long overdue, but coming from a military ruler, they are viewed cynically by the public and the press.
Pakistan’s electoral democracy has a dismal record. The political parties are largely personality cults and family enterprises. Leaders are authoritarian by temperament and arbitrary in their actions. Populist slogans are their ideology. Elected governments have been self-serving and corrupt, as are the military regimes that have ruled in four separate periods totaling 28 years. Pakistan is starved of good government as much as it is lacking a stable democratic rule.
Gen. Musharraf’s election rules, in part, could have been the stimulus for reforming political parties and fostering democratic leaders. Yet they are turning into tools for keeping out of elections Benazir Bhutto, Nawaz Sharif and unintendedly Altaf Hussain, the perpetual leaders of the three leading political parties.
These three leaders are already banished from the country with threats of prosecution on corruption charges filed with the obliging courts. Of course, they are not innocent and have many misdeeds to account for. Yet the military’s drive to prosecute them rehabilitates them as victims of the General’s ambition.
The government is working actively to promote its own brand of politicians, clubbed together in what have been dubbed as ‘King’s parties’. It is perceived to be seeking favorable results from elections, in the form of a submissive parliament and collaborating leaders. There are persistent news about civil and military bureaucracies actively promoting the favored candidates and the General cutting backroom deals with compliant politicians. These activities have further eroded the credibility of the election rules.
The dynamics of elections in Pakistan is not easily controllable. Interestingly most political parties, including Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and Sharif’s Muslim League, have found ways to conform to the letter of the law. Most have hurriedly held party elections with leaders being acclaimed and their nominees winning uncontested. Accounts have been submitted and in some cases new parties floated to get around regulatory barriers. Some candidates have ‘found’ college degrees to qualify for contesting elections. Thus the politicians are ready for elections in the hope of being in a better position to bargain with the military.
Gen Musharraf has promised ‘fair and clean” elections which probably means that there will not be an official stuffing of the ballot boxes or manipulations of vote counts. The desired results are being sought through the rules and restrictions of elections, elimination of unacceptable politicians’ by rejecting their nominations for elections, and by extending official patronage to the favored politicians. Yet elections are unlikely to be entirely scripted. Voters are canny and, by and large, skeptical. The main political challenge is to enthuse voters to come out on the election day.
The argument that democracy will be strengthened with the cleansing action of repeated elections carries little resonance in Pakistan. In the period 1988 1999, four national elections were held in rapid succession, bringing Bhutto and Sharif to power alternatively in two cycles. The military loomed over their governments and interfered in political affairs. Despite these limitations, the two leaders showed no inclination to temper their arbitrary and highly personalized style of rule. People remained just spectators of their maneuvering and were quickly disenchanted with their respective misrules and corruption.
Gen. Musharraf, initially popular, has lost people’s trust in three years. Although his rule has been one of the freest periods for the press and public expression and personally he is not tainted by corruption, but people have, by and large, lost faith in his policies and promises. There is a strong sentiment for the change of government.
Preparations for elections are in full swing. The National Election Commission has registered 71 political parties out of 129 that applied. They are deemed to have fulfilled the requirements of the Political Parties Order (2002). Among the parties are eight Muslim Leagues, three People’s Parties and 18 parties of Islamic professions. Six promise socialism, e.g. Communist Mazdoor Kisan Party and Pakistan Progressive Party and a number of parties of ethnic and regional identities. Most of these parties have been derisively called ‘Tonga Parties’, that is the whole party can be packed in a tonga, a six-seat horse carriage. About 4000 candidates are contesting for 342 National Assembly seats and 9650 candidates are aspiring to the memberships of the four provincial assemblies.
It appears that the real contenders are the old guard: People’s Party (Bhutto’s) and Muslim League (Nawaz) nationally, Muttahida Qaumi Movement in urban Sind, Awami National Party in the Frontier Province and Jamaat-i- Islami as well as Jamaiat Ulema Islam in pockets here and there.
Elections may bring up some new faces and fresh ideologies, but people’s apathy and voters low turnout may thwart this possibility.
What will the elections bring? Perhaps democracy, but its scope will have to be worked out by bargaining with the General and the military. Will an elected executive bring a modicum of good government! This is the question that people ask.
If one party emerges with the clear majority nationally and provincially, its political space for bargaining with the General will expand. Whereas if the elections throw up a host of small parties and coalition governments, the military’s hand will be strengthened. The elections and the re-ignition of the political process offer more hope for a promising change than the continuation of the visibly exhausted military rule. Gen. Musharraf’s government needs legitimacy. If the current government is not legitimized politically, it may be changed through popular protests, agitations and violence, as has happened in Pakistan repeatedly. Pakistanis are irrepressible people. They have not been able to
get good governments, but they have not put up long with authoritarian, corrupt or ineffective rulers. The people’s low tolerance for misrule is the basis of hope for democracy in Pakistan.