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05-11-2006, 14:16 PM
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#46 (permalink)
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Postmaster General
Military Professional
Join Date: 08-20-03
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Quote:
The bedrock of autocracy
By I. A. Rehman
THE most fundamental characteristics of autocracy in the present age of democracy are: a) absence of a political watchdog to oversee the working of the Executive; and b) reduction of the mandatory general election into an inconsequential ritual. Last week the Pakistan establishment took long and firm strides to fulfil both of these conditions.
No serious student of politics has had any doubt about the intimate ties between the political party supposed to be in power — PML-Q — and the head of the state. However, it was generally considered inexpedient to shout about this affair from housetops. That is, till last week when in an unprecedented display of godfather’s affection for the ruling party President Musharraf gave an audience to its Punjab branch and tendered advice to its central executive.
No secret was made of the president’s directive to the PML-Q to restore unity in its rank so that it had no difficulty in winning another term in office next year. Also, consensus (among parties that matter) emerged on two basic issues: that Ch Shujaat Husain will stay on as the PML-Q chief regardless of the party elections due to be held soon, and that the party had resolved to get Gen Musharraf elected President of Pakistan for another term and, most probably, without requiring him to hang his uniform.
Although questions of respect for political propriety have long ceased to be raised in Pakistan, many were intrigued by the president’s show of concern for the PML-Q’s future and his open support to it in next year’s general election. The reason is the presidential initiative amounted to an authoritative verdict on the party’s incapacity to move forward without its comprehensive insurance by the presidency. Further, the PML-Q is not without experts in its councils (Mr S. M. Zafar and Mr Wasim Sajjad to name only two) who could have told Gen. Musharraf that patronage of a political party was mandated as part of his duty neither in his capacity as president nor as the Chief of the Army Staff.
The risks in confirming the PML-Q’s status as the king’s party were fairly obvious. The clamour the country’s democratic fringe was bound to make could be ignored with customary haughtiness, but the trouble was that patrons among the big powers could misunderstand the matter. Obviously this risk was considered less decisive than the urgency of propping up the PML-Q outfit. The only explanation is that the party did not feel confident of victory in 2007 and even if did its confidence was not shared by the presidency.
Indeed, the president’s decision to openly involve himself with the affairs of a political group must be seen in the context of the PML-Q’s recent shopping in the political bazaar. An opposition stalwart was persuaded to convert to the ruling party for a seat in the Senate, the office of a district Nazim and revival of a commercial project. Another opposition MNA was rewarded for defection with the office of a minister of state. A former opposition MNA was made senator after he discovered the importance of joining the PML-Q.
Despite this record of happy hunting, it was considered necessary to make the president’s intervention public, perhaps in the hope that the trickle of support to the ruling party will develop into a flood by the autumn of 2007. We are quite familiar with the election-eve phenomenon of a great spurt in the popularity of a political party that is the designated victor before the polls.
Whatever the reasons that impelled the president to issue writs to the PML-Q, the effect on the polity is unlikely to be healthy. At least that is what history tells us.
Pakistan came into being at a time when the defects of allowing a single person to be the head of a political party as well as the chief of the government formed by it were being very seriously debated. There was a broad agreement that constitutional formulate regarding the distribution of powers among the Executive, the Legislature and the Judiciary could not be adequate in new democracies and therefore strong political parties were necessary to keep a watch over their governments. Pakistan’s acceptance of this formulation was revealed in two developments.
The Quaid-i-Azam, who became governor-general and president of the Constituent Assembly in August 1947, resigned as head of the Muslim League four months later. Ch. Khaliquzzaman functioned as head of the PML for some time before Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan ruled it was necessary for him to be head of government and the party both, in a complete reversal of the position he had adopted some time earlier. From then on nothing could stop the decline of the system of government’s answerability to the party as well as the erosion of the democratic credentials of the political parties.
Within a short time the party became the handmaiden of the executive. Whoever became prime minister also inherited the League presidentship (if the government was formed by the PML). As a result Pakistan chose to free the executive of the nuisance of a party watchdog and the transformation of Pakistan into an authoritarian state under a democratic facade was expedited.
The military rulers had little interest in resurrecting the political parties’ watchdog role, except for Ayub Khan, who was obliged to take over the leadership of his faction of the Muslim League but kept the party subservient to the executive. His successors in uniform preferred elimination of political parties altogether. The most amazing part of the story is that even governments of political parties (PPP, PML and PML-N) too relied completely on executive authority and kept the party apparatus idle except for some criminal adventures.
It will be said that the hold of parties over their governments has disappeared, or at least weakened, across the world. The present crop of politicos in India, for instance, may not have even heard of the Kamraj plan which was devised to reaffirm the identities of government and party as two distinctly different political entities and reinforce the authority of the party to hold the government to account.
The political parties in the USA have always been merely fund-raising machines for their presidential candidates and in Britain political parties are heard of only during annual conferences. But then in both these countries the party representatives in legislatures function as party outfit, and the executive cannot take them for granted. The supersession of political parties in a country such as Pakistan is extraordinarily dangerous as it does not have any substitutes’ (such as assembly parties capable of standing up to chief executives).
In a country like Pakistan, denial of a political party’s role, especially when it enjoys majority support in elective bodies, not only creates space for autocracy, it also affects the efficiency of the state’s legislative and executive organs. If members of legislatures and ministers are not chosen on the strength of their work for political parties but receive offices as favour from the executive, they can never appreciate the needs and aspirations of the people nor can they realize the demands of their offices because their overriding concern is to keep the dispenser of favours in a favourable frame of mind.
The longer a country allows its executive to supplant representative political apparatuses, the deeper into the mire of autocracy it will sink.
It will not be fair to say that Pakistan’s frequent deviations from democratic governance has entirely been due to elimination of party control over governments, but it can safely be asserted that the executives success in making the party subservient to its whims and caprices has been one of the major factors in the consolidation of autocratic rule in Pakistan. The reasons are many and the principal one is that democracy requires debate, consultation and consensus at as many forums as possible.
On the other hand, autocracy finds safety in reducing and, if possible, eliminating all forums of political debate and consultation. Thus we find authoritarian regimes keen to have as little debate in parliamentary organs (if they are allowed at all) as possible and making sure that no non-official forum is allowed to develop a tradition of political discourse. In this scheme of things political parties cannot escape petrification. The latest demonstration of the ruling party’s subservience to the executive clearly means that a return to a functional democracy is not on the establishment’s agenda.
Announcements that nobody should have any doubt about General Pervez Musharraf’s staying on in the presidency for another term and the extraordinary effort being made to ensure PML-Q’s victory in the general election amount to determining ‘positive results’ even before the electoral process has begun. Wherever it is possible for a state establishment to predetermine election results, its system has never been accepted as democratic. The world has known several models in which every adult citizen has the right to vote and polling is regularly held and the result was victory by a heavy margin for the incumbents. Neither such elections nor these states are accepted as democratic.
Unless something radical happens and the establishment can be dissuaded from carrying out its plans for the general election, the verdict on Pakistan will be no different. After all, elections have meaning only as mechanics of change; if all chances of change are plugged in advance, election becomes a bad farce.
That the effort to protect the authoritarian nature of the Pakistan regime should be made at this particular time of Pakistan’s history is doubly regrettable. The establishment’s advisers seem to have learnt nothing from the misfortunes of governments that tried to extend their tenure by aiming at electoral victory greater than the one that brought them into power in the first instance. One example may be sufficient.
In Ayub Khan’s first national assembly the opposition was considerably strong; it forced the absolute ruler to restore the fundamental rights chapter of the Constitution, accept the right of political parties to be represented in the assembly and of national assembly members to be ministers. In the election to the second national assembly the establishment went in for an overkill and the opposition was reduced to a small rump. That great majority did not help Ayub Khan in surviving the challenge not only to his presidency but also to his political engineering. And Z.A. Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif both fell because they had “heavy mandates” and not for want of such exalted position.
The messy thing that democratic governance is happily depends on non-intervention by the executive. Those who wish to make it conform to barrack culture will end up destroying not only representative government but much else.
http://www.dawn.com/2006/05/11/op.htm
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05-11-2006, 23:40 PM
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#47 (permalink)
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Senior Contributor
Join Date: 08-06-04
Location: New Delhi
Country:
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by Asim Aquil
I'm part of the public opinion that welcomed the overthrow of NS.
There was basically no way left he could be replaced either. He toppled the Judiciary, he came to power winning by a huuuuge mandate apparently, he toppled the Jhangir Karamat and placed his own guy, Musharraf.
If Musharraf hadn't acted no one would've had any chance of getting rid of him.
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Too bad the other spectrum of the Pakistani political opinion didn't even get a chance to voice itself and Musharraf gunned his way to power and still hold's onto it thru the military prowess of the army.
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05-12-2006, 05:02 AM
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#48 (permalink)
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Banished
Join Date: 05-03-06
Location: Hindustan Meri Jaan
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Do u know why is he so Popular???
Look at the following article!
http://atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/GG19Ag03.html
Quote:
Musharraf and his Taliban 'pals'
The signs are unmistakable: America's "war on terror" is in jeopardy in Afghanistan, although the locus of the renewed Taliban-led efforts seems to be across the border in Pakistan.
Playing favorites
US and other Western government officials have always been lavish in their praise of Pakistan's President General Pervez Musharraf. Indeed, Musharraf's supposed about-turn on supporting the Taliban after the September 11 attacks is now accepted without question. Most Taliban emerged from madrassas (seminaries) in Pakistan. However, it has always been a reality that Musharraf has treated the Taliban differently than he did al-Qaeda. For instance, even though Pakistan has arrested and handed over to the US many senior al-Qaeda leaders, not a single senior Taliban commander has been handed over by Pakistan to either the US or the Afghan government.
It is an open secret in Pakistan that virtually the entire leadership of the Taliban military hierarchy lives and operates out of the city of Quetta, which is the capital of Pakistan's Balochistan province. Since the fall of the Taliban in Kabul in late 2001, Western and Pakistani reporters have been able to interview Taliban commanders and other leading figures well inside Pakistan, especially around Quetta. Despite the documented facts, the Pakistan government has always flatly denied the presence of Taliban commanders in Quetta, or elsewhere inside Pakistan for that matter.
Afghan anger
The Afghan government led by President Hamid Karzai has for some time been angry at the role of Pakistan in the recent resurgence of the Taliban. In the run-up to the Afghan presidential elections last year, Karzai complained about Taliban bases inside Pakistan to US President George W Bush. In the days that followed, Bush reportedly had a quiet conversation with Musharraf, asking him to look into Taliban activity emanating from Quetta. The Taliban attacks ended almost immediately.
The outgoing US ambassador to Kabul, Zalmay Khalilzad, was a staunch critic of Pakistan's support for the Taliban. However, his anger was especially evident when he excoriated Pakistan a few weeks ago after a Pakistani television network was able to interview a Taliban commander named Mullah Usmani. Khalilzad questioned Pakistan's sincerity and wondered how a television network was able to talk to a Taliban commander even as Pakistani officials denied a Taliban presence in the country. What was left unsaid was that the US government soon came to know that Mullah Usmani gave the interview not from the tribal areas of Pakistan on the border with Afghanistan, but from the port city of Karachi.
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