Ask any senior western diplomat in Islamabad about Mian Nawaz Sharif’s prospects for survival and the response will be as follows: “Benazir should not trifle with threats of resignation and protest movements. The cause of democracy should come first. The present government should be allowed to last its full term. It doesn’t matter if it’s corrupt, which government isn’t? Destabilising Sharif means encouraging martial law and that would be disastrous for the country”.
How times have changed. In July 1977, the same breed of foreign diplomats was saying quite another thing. “Thank God ZAB has gone. The party’s over. Democracy doesn’t work in third world countries. Good government rather than representative government is what people want”. Gen Zia ul Haq, of course, provided neither good government nor adequate representation. In fact, quite the contrary. He mortgaged the economy and devastated the social fabric of society. Thanks to him, we are reaping the bitter harvest of sectarianism and ethnic strife and our landscape is pocked by drugs and guns. All the while, of course, there wasn’t a murmur of protest from the Diplomatic Enclave in Islamabad about the erosion of democratic institutions and human rights in Zia’s Pakistan.
Or take the matter of Benazir Bhutto’s ouster by President Ishaq Khan in August 1990. What did these gentlemen say? “Shame, really, because we had great expectations. But, really, the old man had no choice. God, but her government was corrupt and inefficient. At any rate, it’s all perfectly constitutional, of course”. Not a word about democracy, not a hint about Mian Nawaz Sharif’s running conspiracies to destabilise her government, not even an allusion to Gen Aslam Beg’s well known endevours to undermine legitimate civilian authority.
All of which leads to the question of the day. Why should powerful foreign powers be interested in the continuation of the present government when it is corrupt beyond redemption and is openly flouting all the rules of decent, constitutional behaviour?
For an answer, look at the situation from the vested point of view of western powers. Mian Nawaz Sharif’s privatisation and deregulation policies, notwithstanding bunglings and profiteering, fall perfectly in line with the “end of ideology” mood in the West. The market can do no wrong and a free market crusader like Nawaz Sharif is bound to get high marks from Washington and London. If you add to the prime minister’s “considerable achievements ” in this area his belated willingness to toe the line in Afghanistan, freeze the nuclear programme, sever his relationship with the Jamaat i Islami and tone down his rhetoric on Islamising the economy and liberating Kashmir, what more could any western friend want from Pakistan? At the end of the day, one Nawaz Sharif in hand is worth more than Benazir Bhutto and Gen Asif Nawaz in the bush. It makes eminently good sense, therefore, to pooh pooh any hint or suggestion of change in Islamabad.
But that is not the way Pakistanis should view things. We should be concerned that capricious privatisation and wanton deregulation may do more harm than good to the economy. We should be worried when constitutional rules and norms of political bahaviour are flouted with impunity, when amendments to the constitution are tabled and passed in a mere 40 minutes, when Presidential Ordinances trip over themselves in a mad rush to bypass a sitting parliament. We should be alarmed when volatile Islamisation policies erode the consistency of our laws and lead to instability. And, as citizens, we should stand up and say ‘no’ when we feel that the value of our vote will not be worth the paper it is printed on tomorrow. These things should matter to us, even if they don’t mean a hoot to our foreign friends.
Of course, no one wants martial law. But the choice is not between ‘bad’ or ‘defiled’ democracy on the one hand and ‘soft’ or ‘hard’ authoritarianism on the other. It is between good and bad democracy or, if you like, between better or worse democracy. The choice is not between suffocating public regulation and dynamic private enterprise. It is between a free wheeling market that leads to monopoly or restrictive practices and a responsible market than spawns free, healthy competition. The choice is not between one set of elusive Shariat laws and another corpus of inflexible Anglo-Saxon codes. It is between ignorance and enlightenment, between backwardness and progress, between the twilight of a past era and the brilliance of a future century. It is not between foreign aid and self-reliance, it is between dependency and independence.
If we are entitled to make these choices, we are entitled to criticise our leaders when they go astray and change them if their misdemeanors so warrant. On that count, we should have no qualms about seeing the back of Mian Nawaz Sharif’s bad government. Democracy is not strengthened by accepting its transgressions in the name of ‘stability’, it is fortified by challenging its violations and trying again and again to make it better. What remains is to negotiate a responsible and acceptable way of running and changing governments. That is what we should be talking about, rather than begging the issue by fearing martial law.