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The age of retribution

India should give up notion of democracy in Pakistan as experiences with both Bhuttos & Nawaz show an elected leader in Pakistan doesn't mean dealing with institutionalised democracy.

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It is too early to write Mian Nawaz Sharif’s obituary. From Mujib to Mandela to Benazir, post-War history is replete with instances of political leaders surviving long incarceration and returning to power. Why, even our own Vajpayees, Advanis and George Fernandeses did their time in Mrs Gandhi’s prisons at a time when the Emergency looked like a chilly winter that would never end.

That is why it isn’t also time yet for me to begin betraying confidences — purely journalistic ones — shared with Nawaz Sharif. But there is one story that is rather relevant today, and truly in the style of the television soap operas, I’d rather tell it backwards, flashback and all.

During his first term as prime minister, my phone rang in the middle of a summer night. Someone senior from the Pakistan High Commission was on the line. “I am sorry to bother you,” he said, “but the prime minister’s office from Islamabad has called to check on a conversation you had with him during your recent visit to Islamabad.” During the conversation, he said, I had mentioned an Indian law to regulate the Army’s role in internal security. The prime minister’s office wanted to know if I could tell them the name of the law and, if possible, get them a copy of it.

“No problem,” I said. “It is the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. You can buy it from any law bookshop.” This they did the next morning and I even got a thank you call through a lower-level factotum.

Flashback: Nawaz Sharif’s greatest moment until then — the counting day of the elections. He stopped me for a cup of tea for “gupshup” at the end of a press conference and asked, quite innocently, as to what the Army would do if a government lost majority on the floor of the House and if a subsequent election produced a hung Parliament.

I said: “It is quite simple, the defeated government would continue as a caretaker one and would continue in the case of a hung Parliament until a fresh one is rigged together.”

“You mean your Army does not step in and set up an interim government?” he asked.

“No. Our Army does no such thing. It is also expected to do no such thing.””Par aapka aaeen kya kehta hai? (But what does your Constitution say?) Under which circumstances does it empower the Army to intervene?”

“Our Constitution says no such thing,” I said. “It just says the President is the supreme commander of the armed forces.”

“But when there is trouble in Assam or Punjab, how does your Army intervene?” he asked, perplexed yet persistent.

I explained to him that our Army never “intervenes”. Usually, it is called out in aid of civil power in which case it works under the authority of the local magistracy. In a really difficult situation like an insurgency where it really needs autonomy of action, the civilian authority invokes the Armed Forces Special Powers Act.

The reason he had recalled the conversation now and wanted a copy of the Act was quite evident. Karachi was on fire then, his Army was itching to “intervene” and he was groping for a constitutional mechanism to control it. But why is this story relevant now, on the first day of his life as a convict?


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Nawaz Sharif’s, and in fact Pakistan’s, real tragedy is that it has grown to be quite a robust nation state without actually building any constitutional or even systemic infrastructure to support it. So there are no constitutional norms to deal with crises, to manage the transition between elections even during the longer phases of democracy, and certainly nothing to prevent military take-overs. The two leaders who were elected in that relatively long democratic phase after Zia’s death did not have first the authority and then (in Nawaz Sharif’s case after he won a two-thirds majority) the intellect to build one.

His instincts were not too bad. In so many conversations he would curse the constitutional confusion in his country. His favourite line was: What is this system, aadha teetar, aadha bateir (half a partridge, half a quail)? So he did start out by abolishing the Eighth Amendment that gave the president overriding powers to control the armed forces and to dismiss an elected government and parliament. But he could not comprehend that just this wasn’t good enough to make his system fully a quail.

He did not understand the need, the value, or even the meaning, of a constitutional system of checks and balances. His temperament is that of a Mughal badshah, a bit like Shahjehan if you wish to be charitable. He also did not have, around him, any liberal minds to nudge him in the direction of building a genuine democracy and, instinctively, he was bored and irritated by its usual distractions. “Tell me one thing,” he once asked, “do the courts interfere in governance in your country the way they do here?” I tried to explain to him the phenomenon of great judges, activists like Kuldip Singh and moralists like J.S. Verma, but he wasn’t impressed. “You can’t govern a country like that, chhaddo ji (forget it)…” is all he would say, with a wave of the hand.

So what did he set out to do? He saw the abolition of the Eighth Amendment not as the strengthening of the democratic system for future generations but as a way of making his own sultanate more secure. He raped and pillaged his judiciary, let loose on the media an army of thugs who were so vicious that it was soon talking about Zia’s days in nostalgic terms. His goons in the media and the clergy painted all the NGOs and other liberal institutions (the few that existed in Pakistan) in the darkest of colours — foreign agents and all — and sent them into hiding. Then you complain about why no one rose to his defence or even in protest against the coup. Nawaz Sharif destroying his judiciary, media and liberal institutions and then complaining that he was convicted by a kangaroo court and abandoned by the civil libertarians and the rest is a bit like a man killing his parents and then demanding mercy on grounds of being an orphan. It simply does not work in real life.

Since he is not given to reading very much and Musharraf is unlikely to equip the prison cell with a DVD player and a supply of Indian movies, Nawaz Sharif will have a lot of time to think these issues through, and it is possible — I’d reckon, likely — that he will return to the political centrestage a much chastened man, having learnt the essence of wielding power in a democracy. But what lessons does his predicament have for us, the moralisers of the world, the self-styled guardian angels of democracy around the Third World, with the exception of some non-aligned brethren like Cuba and Libya?

First of all, give up, for a long, long time, the obsession with democracy in Pakistan. Our disillusioning experience with both the Bhuttos and Nawaz clearly shows that an elected leader in Pakistan doesn’t necessarily mean that we are dealing with a system of institutionalised democracy. The latter means consistency, continuity, even when governments and policies change.

Indira Gandhi made the first blunder while signing the Simla Agreement, in overestimating the staying power of an elected Bhutto and his democratic commitment. Rajiv repeated this with Bhutto’s daughter and then the Vajpayee government, and many of us, the so-called Pakistan experts, got it a bit wrong in confusing Nawaz’s own dictatorial power with the arrival of a really robust democracy.


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We ourselves have a far from perfect democratic system. But if it has survived this long and has emerged strong and if no Indian prime minister ever has to call somebody in London or Washington to check what kind of laws to formulate to control his Army, it is because democracy came to India before self-governance. It was an integral feature of our freedom movement and then the main pillar of our nation-building. The Pakistani equivalent, unfortunately, was the two-nation theory. That is why its founding fathers did not spend so much time writing a real constitution, in cementing institutions that will stand the test of time. In trying to keep pace with the changing world now, they have flirted with democracy, through elections, but, in the absence of the institutions, it cannot work.

Once we accept this reality, it becomes that much easier to deal with a Pakistani dictator. Because, as Vajpayee said at Lahore, nobody can change geography, nobody can change his neighbours. Similarly you cannot enforce on your neighbour the system you wish to have over there. We can now blackball Musharraf, and God knows he has given us enough cause to do so. We can wait for the next elected leader, in 2001 or whenever. But we must remember that we will once again be dealing with a Nawaz or a Benazir who would, inevitably, either become a dictator, or be overthrown. Until a movement builds from within Pakistani society to build a genuinely democratic and liberal system with all its irritants, there will be no real democracy in Pakistan.

On all evidence, that will take a long, long time, perhaps until Nawaz gets out of the jail and, inshallah, becomes a democrat at heart. Do we want to wait until then to defreeze our relationship? Or, isn’t it more prudent to be on talking terms with Musharraf, or any such leaders that the Pakistanis — quite deservingly — continue to be ruled by, in the meanwhile?


Also read: What the amazing rise & sudden death of a ‘Holy Warrior’ tell us about Islam & politics in Pakistan


 

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