Many disgraced prime ministers have wandered this earth. But in modern times fee, very few, have been condemned in law. Concerns of state have over-ridden the desire for vengeance; stability is too high a price to pay for legal satisfaction.
With references now lodged against deposed Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, and the question of state stability thrown to the fourth winds, we may ask whose vengeance and whose satisfaction is to be served by these proceedings.
Certainly not justice. The inequity of destroying a few carefully selected political careers with charges of sifarish and incompetence should banish any thought that justice is being served by this sudden outbreak of accountability.
Nor is democracy fostered by this desperate bid to circumscribe the electorate’s choice and engineer a ‘positive result’. In tracking down and bringing to ground the last Prime Minister, President Ishaq and his government have torn apart democracy’s first rule: that outgoing government leave office safe to fight another day. If prosecution and persecution is that price of vacating office, no defeated government will willingly surrender power to its opposition.
So, just as Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s hanging condemned us to eleven years of martial law and blackened the name of our judiciary throughout the world, the trial of his daughter will disfigure democracy and drag the courts back again into the political mire.
And the winners of before will be the winners again: the generals and the bureaucrats who cannot abide the encroachment of the democratic state onto pastures on which they have long grazed.
Even among the politicians of the opposition who in their short sighted greed for power called for dissolution of the assemblies, many are now distancing themselves from the accountability process. For in it they too now see the weakening of the democratic state and the eclipse of their own roles.
This they had not bargained for. Yet it is inherent in the process that the President initiated when he over-rode the democratic system and dissolved the assemblies. The prosecution of ministers and then the Prime Minister is the unfolding of the same logic; it is demanded by the need to justify the original action. Yet the logic cannot be stopped here, it cannot be dropped when its job has been done.
The fundamentally undemocratic logic is now determining our political future. It says that the people’s choice cannot be trusted; that a higher authority must vet their decision. It i the logic of a past age.
It is of the age when repression was cheap, before economies demanded educated workers determined to have their say in how their country was run. The nations of the modern world have long discarded it. All those who seek to enter it have thrown it off — witness Eastern Europe.
Even under the provocation of a President caught bugging and burglarising his opposition, the United States refrained from prosecution. Nixon was pardoned and the democratic process ran on.
For democratic legitimacy is a valuable commodity. And its value is rising just as we undermine that legitimacy in our own country by taking our last Prime Minister before a special tribunal. Elections held while the leader of the largest party is either held in jail or watching from the sidelines, disqualified from standing, will reduce us to the level of Burma. There, a democracy languishes — with the Prime Minister-designate in prison — while the generals ponder and the economy, deprived of foreign aid, falls deeper into depression.
By prosecuting Benazir Bhutto we align ourselves with countries like Burma, countries cut off from the democratic mainstream and the benefits it brings. Worse, we fly in the face of history. We not only repeat out own mistakes but those of all the nations which have kept themselves backwards. It is a sad irony that we have decided to walk backwards through history just at the moment when so many other nations have just leapt forward to claim a place in a new age.