Tribulations of parliamentary democracy

Islamabad diary
This is not the failure of democracy. But it certainly is the failure of one brand of democracy, that of the parliamentary kind. We just don’t seem to have it in us to work this system: neither the sophistication, nor the maturity, nor the patience.
Politicians who work the thaana and patwar systems in their hometowns and constituencies, how are they to become parliamentary lions when they move to Islamabad? Leaders who haven’t read a book in their lives, for whom indeed academic learning of any kind is an anathema, how are they to interact on an equal footing with generals and bureaucrats who in their staff courses at least acquire a smattering of academic knowledge, if in the majority of instances it is not much more than that?
Present-day Pakistan is in a state of permanent crisis, one crisis hardly abating before another rears its head. Inadequate leadership is not only compounding this problem, it is creating it. If we had slightly better leadership would it have gone out of its way to confront the army, as over the Musharraf case and its subsequent fallout? With slightly more sensitive leadership would we have the Model Town affair and the subsequent cover-up? Would better leadership not have averted, or softened the blow of, the Imran Khan and Qadri dharnas? Would we have had the oil crisis, unprecedented in our history, if there had been a slightly more competent team managing the country’s affairs?
But how does all this amount to the failure of parliamentary democracy? Would we have fared any better under a presidential system? Let me try to explain.
The overriding lessons of Pakistani history are two: 1) unchecked military rulers – such as Yahya, Zia and Musharraf – have been utter disasters; and 2) civilian prime ministers, starting from Bhutto and including Nawaz Sharif, who had no monitors or supervisors to guide or check them, have proved to be no better.
Bhutto might not have tempted the furies if a powerful president had been sitting over him. Nawaz Sharif would not be the utter failure he is proving to be if instead of the running joke in the Presidency there had been someone with the powers of a headmaster. And parliament would not be the empty showcase it has become if the powers of dissolution, as in the struck-down Article 58 2(b), had not been taken from the Presidency.
Something in our climate has prevented the emergence of guiding strongmen such as Kemal Ataturk or de Gaulle, or even such figures as Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore or the now-forgotten Park Chung Hee of South Korea. (The strongmen we’ve had – Ghulam Muhammad, Iskander Mirza, Ayub, Yahya, et al – would not gain admittance in a half-decent rogues’ gallery.) And something about our history or the nature of our soil has militated against the development of efficient or even workable parliamentary democracy.
Bhutto was the best prime minister we had and even he could neither curb his overweening ambition nor master his autocratic instincts…nor indeed get rid of his inner demons. Far from strengthening democracy his rule set the stage for Gen Zia’s extended counter-revolution, from whose effects we continue to suffer until today. Zia gave us ‘jihad’, he gave us Islamic militancy and, lest we forget, he gave us Nawaz Sharif.
What then is the solution? A halfway house, a reworking of the constitution to give us something like the French system: a directly-elected president with say over defence and foreign policy, and the power to appoint the service chiefs, and a National Assembly electing a prime minister to run the day-to-day affairs of the government.
In effect we already have a halfway house in that circumstances, and cumulative incompetence, have pushed the prime minister and his government into a corner and allowed the army to step forward and assume charge of defence and foreign policy. But this arrangement is ad hoc and not grounded in the constitution. And it is predicated entirely on the personality of the army chief, Gen Raheel, who if he had not been Raheel but someone like Musharraf we would have seen something else, something more like a direct takeover, with Nawaz Sharif once again measuring the length and breadth of some Suroor Palace in the desert sands.
Should we live with ad hocism and hope for the best, and trust in our luck that Gen Raheel will remain just that and not one fine morning turn into a Field Marshal el-Sisi, or should we have the foresight and imagination to read our circumstances correctly and fashion a system more suited to our perennial incompetence?
We can’t have military rule because, as our past vividly demonstrates, it can only be an exercise in more disaster. And we can’t have prime ministers trying to run the show on their own when we’ve had ample opportunity of finding out that they don’t have the capacity for this.
There is no better argument against military rule than a mug-shot of Gen Zia. One look at it and you will give up all thought of military rule. There is no more compelling argument against Westminster democracy than that photo of Nawaz Sharif sitting next to Gen Raheel in General Headquarters, looking lost and clueless. When the definitive history of our times is written this picture is sure to be remembered.
This is double misery, for the prime minister and for Pakistan. He is miserable and so are we. Hasn’t the time come to put an end to this two-way torture? The PPP got its full five-year term in office, hailed as democratic continuity, and we are still reeling from its after-effects. The PML-N has yet to complete two years in office and people are already thinking of proclaiming the ‘azaan’ from their housetops...throughout Islamic history a sign of distress. When nothing else suffices, this is what you do, leave everything to the Lord of the Worlds.
If the PPP gave us democratic indigestion – at the hands of Yusuf Raza Gilani and Pervaiz Asharf the nation receiving enough democracy to last it a lifetime – three more years of the pudding we are presently being served and Pakistan will have to go in for permanent if not terminal intensive care.
When Nawaz Sharif was the darling of the ‘establishment’, such eminent tutors as our friend Gen Hamid Gul taking him through his political paces, and ISI officers doling out cash in suitcases to PML-N stalwarts – this in the 1990 elections and all a matter of historical record – certified ‘patriots’ going livid in the face would say, ‘The PPP and Pakistan cannot coexist together’. The question now is: can Pakistan and this shambles of parliamentary democracy coexist together?
What then is the solution? Gen Raheel has already given the prime minister and his government an extensive course in adult education. Is he likely to give more? It seems unlikely. The Supreme Court is the very image of circumspection, as perhaps it should be. This leaves our two turbo missiles: Imran Khan and the Reverend Qadri. The one is recovering from his nuptials, the other from the stress of the dharnas.
Can they step into the breach once more and stir up the pot of discontent, or is the call to prayer – azaans from the housetops – the only recourse left to us?
Email: bhagwal63@gmail.com