Dawn
12 December 2007
In the name of elections
by Mohammad Waseem
THERE seems to be a consensus about the farcical nature of the elections to be held in Pakistan on Jan 8, 2008. There are many who believe these elections to be hardly anything more than a meaningless exercise in mass voting.
They include the organisers of the elections themselves, namely the caretaker government and the Election Commission of Pakistan, along with President Musharraf, the top brass and the civil bureaucracy. Interestingly, of the same belief are the Bush administration abroad and political leaders ranging from Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif to Imran Khan at home.
If so, why should elections be taken so seriously, by those in government and others in opposition? The answer lies in the fact that there is no other way for Musharraf to stay on in power under a civilian framework, especially after shedding his uniform. Similarly, there is no other option for political leaders to get rid of him except through entering the system via the ballot.
Politicians do not have the power to launch a coup against a general, who retired only a few days ago and who is perceived to be enjoying the support of the new COAS. Whether they should participate in elections or not has been the politicians’ dilemma. They are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.
President Musharraf’s strategy seems to follow three major steps: first, his presidency should be confirmed through a vote of confidence in the next parliament, which makes it imperative for him to get a majority for the ‘king’s parties’. But, secondly, the elections should have a semblance of legitimacy in order to make the next legislature function smoothly and avoid what increasingly looks like a mass movement in the making.
Thirdly, he must regain the confidence of his supporters abroad, especially the Bush administration, as also the diplomatic community in general. Currently his standing in the world at large as well as within the country is at the lowest point. Elections are expected to boost his image.
But elections can go either way. The grim prospects of losing the election in favour of one or the other of the two political juggernauts represented by the PPP and PML-N would almost certainly put Musharraf’s presidency in jeopardy.
That leads to the need for making the PML-Q victorious one way or the other. Therefore, the election strategy is required to be carefully charted out so as to keep the president’s position invulnerable under a civilian set-up.
The political opposition was never so confused and so disunited. Currently, political parties fall in three categories. Some aligned themselves with the government in the recent past, overtly or covertly, such as the JUI as part of the MMA and the MQM. These parties are still not convinced that the time has come for Musharraf to go. They have rendered a great service to the latter by keeping their political workers off the street and enjoying the crumbs of power as a quid pro quo. For them, elections are welcome.
The second category includes the PPP from the opposition. Musharraf needed the support of those in Washington who supported the idea of expanding his power base by bringing Benazir on board. The more his popularity shrank, the more he became dependent on external input. Benazir Bhutto gave clear signals that she was ready to be convinced of the inevitability of participation in elections.
The MRD’s boycott of elections held under Ziaul Haq was later regretted by the parties which opted out. It gave room to the Junejo government to move in. The 1985 syndrome amply explains the hesitation of many to boycott the 2008 elections. They see the coming elections as immoral and illegal. But they also see darkness after the boycott, hence the willingness of some of them to jump into the fray. This is, then, the third category of politicians.
The elections in January will most likely not be issue-based in character. There will be election manifestos of political parties, big and small. There will be promises to bring about changes in policy, to make it more Islamic or more distributive in nature. But the reality is that elections will not bring up issues, which usually dominate campaigns in the mature democracies.
This is because even prior to approaching the voting public, the daunting prospect of un-free and unfair elections are haunting the political community. One raises issues to appeal to voters so as to win a seat for the national or a provincial assembly. If one is never sure of transparency in the process of conversion of votes into seats, one needs to go, first, for ensuring this and only secondly for eliciting votes.
With the kind of caretaker governments in place at the national and provincial levels and the Election Commission of Pakistan being what it is, cynicism about predetermined results is rampant. This is somewhat along the lines of the 2002 referendum and general elections, and the 2005 local bodies polls, when the steamroller of the official machinery produced results contrary to the expectations of candidates and voters.
That is why the real issues relate to the sanctity of the ballot itself, removal of nazims who are perceived to be the president’s men and putting an end to the role of intelligence agencies.
The whole issue of participating in, or boycotting, the elections is rooted in the way the Musharraf government has dabbled in extra-constitutional measures. These moves stand out as black events in Pakistan’s history. Starting with the suspension of Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry on March 9, the president proceeded to put the whole constitutional edifice of the state in jeopardy.
A whole series of steps that were taken moved in a direction that went against free and fair elections. This included delaying, tampering with and subverting the process of electioneering, starting from the appointment of Senate chairman Soomro as caretaker prime minister down to beating, arresting and harassing lawyers, media people and students as well as non-PCO judges. The political atmosphere has been vitiated beyond recognition.
Ironically, civil society is active but the political community is not. The civil society currently led by lawyers and media persons is clear about its goals and the means to achieve those goals. The political community is far from clear. It is confused as well as divided.
But civil society is powerless inasmuch as it lacks the means of bringing about the desired legal and constitutional changes. Similarly, the political community is clueless, largely because it is immobilised. There is hardly any interaction between leaders and workers, between party cadres across different political entities, between the politicians and vote deliverers and between the caretakers and contestants out in the field. The proverbial five blind men are groping in the dark to understand the true nature of the current political system.
Among the Musharraf government’s few successes, one can count the ways he factionalised the political parties, destroyed the moral standing of the whole gamut of political leadership on the issue of corruption and divided the political opposition. Broadly, the military-backed ruling elite continues to swear by the Constitution and democracy, often derailing the judicial, constitutional and electoral processes on the way.
All this means that the election process continues to operate on the margins of the political system. Its relevance is procedural not substantive, as a source of constitutional legitimacy for the ongoing ruling set-up, not as a channel for facilitating public participation in the business of the state. The January 2008 elections may not change the status quo, represented by President Musharraf and his increasingly authoritarian rule. Democracy remains as elusive as ever.
