The nation has just been through some of the most agonising days of its history. It didn’t matter which side of the political fence one was on. The angst was equally shared. The suspense wasn’t just whether one’s horse would win. Those not able to count on direct personal gain or loss from the outcome — which means the bulk of the common people — worried also about what would happen afterwards. The result had seemed likely to be an indecisive one. It could just mark the thin end of the wedge.
Should the event have shaken our frail system so? There were reasons that it did just that.
First, this was no routine confidence vote. Even in long established parliamentary democracies such a vote is not brought up lightly. The most bitterly critical of oppositions, too, generally refrain from a showdown until a point of crisis has been reached. The reason simply is that even democracy requires some continuance of rule. If it didn’t, it would long have been discarded as an irrelevance and dictatorship would have enhanced its appeal even for sane people.
The system does provide for the existence of an opposition, but it envisages it as an entity with a positive role of its own; one of acting as a watchdog over the government. It does not define opposition simply as the group defeated in the race to power, and one whose preoccupation should thereafter just be to keep trying to bring down its adversary.
And the system does provide for a change of government at any stage that the latter loses the confidence of the parliament. But that also presumes that confidence should have been accepted to have been reposed in that government in the first instance and that the opposition should not have been emphasising its rejection of the government from the start and creating serious hurdles in the latter’s way whenever it could. If, moreover, the test of confidence were to be heavily influenced by strong doses of material blandishments then surely the process becomes kaput, the constitutional provision senseless.
It is clear that these conditions were not fulfilled in the present move. The proverbial visitor from Mars witnessing the scene would no doubt have noticed the botch-ups of the PPP govern-ment over the past 11 months, the things it did that it shouldn’t have and those it should have but didn’t. But he could not also have failed to note the extraordinary handicaps under which that government happened to function or not function. If it got a split electoral verdict, that was of course its own failure, but it constituted a serious drawback nonetheless. Added to that was the legacy of a hostile Senate, the child of the earlier apolitical, dictatorially dominated era. Second was another legacy of the past: the electric ethnic divide in Sindh which, among other things, prevented the ruling party from making quick advance on its agreement with the MQM and thus stabilising its parliamentary majority and beginning to govern more confidently. Its similar failure to maintain its alliance with ANP could at least partly be attributed to factors it could not have resolved in its first few months.
Most critical, of course, was the fact of an IJI opposition that regarded the PPP government as an unmixed evil and was resolved to free itself of the other’s supremacy. Its having won power in the Punjab, and the disgruntlement that some of the PPP’s own policies had justly or unjustly caused, enabled the IJI to win political allies outside of itself and to build a strong anti-PPP front.
Then there were appeals to the army that it involve itself in the exercise. The offsprings of democracy could not trust the democratic process; they still trusted the army more.
If the whole episode of the past week caused a public scare there was thus sufficient reason for it. It had almost seemed that democracy would find it impossible to function in our parts. If the PPP won, the COP would continue baying at its heels even more fiercely; and if the COP was victorious it would have a thinner edge than its predecessor and would be unable to govern well even if its components somehow managed to stay together once it was in power. The COAS’s warnings to the feuding politicians were hardly reassuring.
There are lessons to learn for the future. Democratic governance requires political good sense from all sides. Follies have cost heavily in the past. They can, God knows, do so all too easily again. Partisan gains of short-sightedness are tempting; but often they yield a harvest of thorns that everyone has to reap. Political wrangling has to have limits. So must both exercise of and opposition to power. The country is not just for the present, nor are the fruits of its governance for one time only. Those who will not be patient, who will not be honest, will be found out. They can depend on that. And then they will not be forgiven.