The local elections are finally over. The politicians and generals should have learnt some valuable lessons. And we should know what to expect from the unfolding roadmap ahead.
The military government’s plans for “devolution of power” announced a year ago, were greeted with cynicism from politicians and press alike. But increasing voter turnout has cheered up some people. Indeed, the appearance of former provincial or national political heavyweights at the District Nazim level also suggests that the military may have succeeded in creating the perception that there could be a real shift of power from the centre to the local level. This, despite the fact that the local elections were marred by administrative opportunism or rigging, as when confronted by the MQM boycott in Sindh, or the fundamentalist opposition to voting by women in the NWFP.
Under the new law, the District Nazim may be expected to lord it over the police and become a very powerful person. Is that an intended consequence of the ordinance?
We think not. The District Nazims will be kept in line by the provincial Governor via the District Coordination Officer. And the Governor, as we have been told, will be appointed by the COAS-President and will hold office at his discretion. And the COAS-President, as we have come to learn, will lord it over the future elected prime minister and his cabinet via a super-charged National Security Council in which the four provincial governors will tilt the votes inescapably in the President’s favour.
So there it is. President General Pervez Musharraf will tell the elected prime minister what to do and his handpicked provincial Governors will tell the District Nazims what not to do. If the prime minister tries to go beyond his brief, he will be rapped on the knuckles and, failing that, sacked. If parliament tries to protect him/her, it will be advised to think again and, failing that, packed off too. Likewise, should any of the many army monitoring teams floating around file an adverse report about any District Nazim’s mischief or flight of fancy, the Governor will quietly ask the Regional Accountability Bureau to lock him/her up and throw the key away.
The same sort of engineering is on the cards for the provincial and national elections. Most of the candidates will be “sorted out”, literally, at the nomination stage. Those who escape the khaki net will be subjected to the discreet charm of the intelligence agencies at the time of voting and the RAB and NAB after the voting is over. Finally, if the herds insist on electing their own independent leaders, they will be throttled by the ubiquitous Governor in the case of errant chief ministers and the President in the case of an unwise prime minister, while the provincial or national assembly, as the case may be, will be advised to show restraint or else.
The essence of the political system that is in the throes of being engineered is clear. At every level of government, the army will determine which civilian is fit or not fit to be elected by his peers. Many who are not acceptable to the generals – for whatever conceivable reason — will not be allowed to contest or will be knocked out after the election on one excuse or another. For the sake of devolutionary form, of course, some of the redundant subjects in the centre’s concurrent list will be offloaded in the exclusive domain of the provincial governments.
It is a neatly designed system. Everything fits into place because it has been conceived by a gang of laptop wannabes. The system will be protected by an anti-virus army shield that is supposed to run unobtrusively in the background. On the face of it, it will be democratic and promise stability and continuity. In reality, however, it could be anything but that. Why’s that?
Despite the claimed failsafe credentials of various military-political operating systems in the past, the fact is that human beings are, by nature, chaotic and averse to programming. For example, it will not be easy to sack parliaments at will without undermining the new system and provoking domestic and international censure. Thus prime ministers and chief ministers, whatever their originally proclaimed timidity, may not be tamed eventually. Likewise, the inherent fluidity of the political situation may preclude any easy reigning in or sacking of errant District Nazims, thereby creating administrative confusion, deadlock and instability. Finally, the inability of the generals to erase Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto and Altaf Hussain from the hearts and minds of large chunks of Pakistanis, may prove to be a blunder. Excluding them from impinging on the new rules of the game by decree is not the same thing as removing them from peoples’ political reckoning altogether.
That is the central flaw in the new system. It is of the military, by the military, and for the military. It is much more intrusive than even the political system in Turkey. This is not democracy. Thus, while the system may succeed in the very short term, its chances are bleak in the longer run.