A promise unfulfilled

by Muhammad Umer

Two years back, the Pakistani nation went to the polls. February 18, 2008, was pregnant with the promise of a future where democracy would resume breathing and public good would be preferred to personal gain. The day also brought the promise of a Pakistan where the rule of law would be respected, corrupt elements culled, economy put back on the right track and quality health care and education ensured. Not that people were expecting a paradise overnight but change was in the air. Hope feeds on pragmatism. Such is the nature of hope.

And the hope for change was not without reason. The people had seen several key changes in the past year, all of which were born out of a civil society movement spearheaded by lawyers and later joined by some political parties for the restoration of judges sacked in March 2007 by then army chief and president Musharraf. It was because of that movement that Musharraf doffed his military uniform, lifted the emergency rule he had imposed on the country on November 3, 2007, and allowed Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif to return from exile. As the February general election drew closer, the nation saw in it a chance to rid itself of a military dictator who had stolen from it as well as from democracy well-nigh a decade. The signing of a Charter of Democracy by Bhutto and Sharif, the archrivals of the 1990s, in 2006 had also given the impression that the country’s political leadership had finally come of age.

But things are still as bad — if not worse — as they were two years ago. The government of the PPP, which came to power by riding the wave of sympathy generated by the assassination of Bhutto, has failed to come up to the expectations of the people. It’s a party bent on destroying itself. It has already squandered a golden opportunity to revive its credibility, which was ruined by corruption charges in Bhutto’s two terms in office. President Zardari and his cronies may be shrewd enough to achieve short-term gains, but they are certainly well qualified for failure that is likely to haunt the PPP for years to come. The government’s economic performance is pungently pathetic. Almost every other commercially viable state institution is reporting losses. The country’s foreign debt has swelled past the $50 billion mark. Who will repay all those billions? Certainly not the rulers who appear to have learnt only to borrow, not to repay. Then there is the curse of cartels profiteering and proliferating at the very behest of the government whose primary job it is to ensure fiscal transparency and just distribution of resources. And don’t forget the gift of rental power projects that will make electricity, already a rare commodity in Pakistan, expensive by up to 70 per cent. Price hikes continue to break the backs of the poor as the government’s own statistics of the past two years show that living has become 50 per cent costlier. Who says the PPP leadership has an economic plan?

Zardari never tires of promising to fulfil the mission of his slain wife but he has made a mockery of the Charter of Democracy by reneging on the very promises she had made to the nation through that document. Parliament remains wreathed in the notorious 17th Amendment and reserved for political theatrics. The Supreme Court has passed several landmark judgements, including the one against the NRO, but the government is dragging its feet on implementing them. It even attempted to undermine the authority of the judiciary on February 13 when Zardari rejected the chief justice’s recommendations for the appointment of judges and appointed two judges of his own choice instead.

Two days later, Prime Minister Gilani issued a not-so-veiled threat to the judiciary when he told the National Assembly that the executive order signed by him in March last year for the restoration of the deposed judges needed parliament’s endorsement! Ludicrous he may have sounded, but wasn’t he essentially trying to threaten the judiciary that the executive order could be withdrawn if Zardari and his cronies facing corruption charges were not let off the hook? It was only after the Supreme Court had suspended the president’s notification of the appointment of judges and lawyers took to the streets in protest that the government realised its folly and withdrew the notification.

The country is therefore bleeding from not only terrorism and militancy but also disrespect for institutions and rule of law. It is an irony that in her article “Pakistan on the brink”, published in The Guardian newspaper’s online edition on July 24, 2007, Bhutto had criticised a similar sorry state of affairs in the Musharraf regime. She wrote: “The suppression of democracy in my homeland has had profound institutional consequences; the major infrastructural building blocs of democracy have been weakened, political parties have been marginalised, NGOs dismantled, judges sacked and civil society undermined.” But now her own party seems to be doing the very things that are inimical to democracy.

The government may have averted a disaster on the issue of judicial appointments, but pressure is growing on Gilani to achieve an uphill task – to help Zardari and his myrmidons stay in power. So we have a president, a prime minister and their ministers who are willing to do anything to cling on to power even if that requires bringing down the whole democratic system. To describe their situation, let me borrow a few words from Sir Walter Scot’s novel Kenilworth: “…he has the more need to have those about him who are unscrupulous in his service, and who, because they know that his fall will overwhelm and crush them, must wager both blood and brain, soul and body, in order to keep him aloft.”

What conclusions should we draw from this mess? That democracy doesn’t deliver and we had better be content with dictatorship? Not at all. Dictatorship has been a hemlock which has so badly stunted the growth of the plant of democracy that it would require a sustained and careful nurturing to be able to flourish on its own. We also need to broaden the concept of democracy in the context of Pakistan where it has come to mean merely elections and assemblies. The democracy we have seen so far is political democracy and that too is very limited. We need to move beyond it. We must introduce social democracy which is incomplete without a culture of tolerance and constructive criticism and economic democracy which advocates a society with equal employment opportunities and a just distribution of resources as its hallmarks. Political parties which fail to convince the electorate of the soundness of their economic plans must not be voted into parliament.

But before we reach that stage, we need to get to grips with the current mess. Opposition leader Nawaz Sharif has finally spoken against the government’s onslaught on the judiciary and its bad governance, calling Zardari as the biggest threat to democracy. We may expect some protests and an intense blame game between the PML-N and the PPP in the days to come, but Sharif’s party is too risk-calculating to go for any radical movement. It’s high time the people, especially the civil society, took the initiative to steer the course of things in a direction that will benefit the cause of democracy. They can no longer afford to remain indifferent to the ongoing political process. Their active participation in this process can make all the difference. They must act first to decide their own future before the ruling elite steals even this opportunity from them.