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Ape parliament. However, he is ineligible straightaway for this post through any type of election being in the service of Pakistan being the Chief of Army Staff. He retired in the fall of 2001, but by his own orders extended his service.

Referendum is undertaken under Article 48 sub-clause (6) of the Constitution. However, this is only permissible for seeking a response to a “question” and is not designed to replace a mandated electoral formula by the Constitution itself. Some have even suggested that making the Nazims, currently created by this regime, into a presidential electoral college, to “ensure” his “presidency”. This is a farcical idea put forth by the most unlearned in the law.

In sum, the present ideas of General Musharraf on democracy do not correspond at all to even the most rudimentary norms of Constitutionalism and negate the vision for governance of Pakistan that the Quaid had. He would serve Pakistan better by not discarding the wisdom of Law or by forgetting the misfortunes of our own history in which military led innovations of established civilian conventions and institutions have proved most damaging. Equally importantly, such steps howsoever feigned, will be seen though making our future more plight ridden than we can possibly afford.

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For a popular mandate


By Rifaat Hamid Ghani

THERE is one basic problem to the referendum. It is about an electoral issue in that we elect — in the sense of having been allowed a yea or nay — to have President Musharraf, as such, hold office for some more years.

At the same time he has assured us of conducting a scheduled election. Why then should an essentially electoral issue need to be decided before national electoral results are hazarded? President Musharraf has asked for a popular mandate. It would be astonishing if he did not receive it. And this assumption is not because of the positive results yielded in the customized (and thence necessarily varied) precedents of referendums conducted by former military dictators.

President Musharraf is indeed regarded at the very least as well-meaning and less financially rapacious than the two former prime ministers, whose conduct, he, like many other Pakistanis, so deplores. Why then the insistence on denying those two individuals an appeal to the electorate they sorely disappointed or, as severer critics put it, betrayed? The explanation could be that he does not trust the people’s judgment and deems it wiser quite unselfishly to impose his own. And this becomes democratically unobjectionable because the people have said he is required.

In announcing the referendum in a national radio broadcast and telecast, the president explained he felt his remaining on the scene was in the better interests of true democracy and economic independence. The essence of democracy was mentioned. Presumably it can be distilled and infused into a military dictatorship in full sail. True democracy is less portable. It demands its own distinct institutions and norms and conventions.

Above all, it is a spontaneous ongoing process, not just an occasional electoral exercise or ascertainment of the popular verdict on an issue or individual personality. Rather than delegating authority to a chosen few, it actualizes the constant and determining content of the people’s participation in institutionalized collective self-government and national decision-making. In that sense, whatever a dictator’s regime does — laudable and popular as well as culpable and unpopular — is inevitably devoid of the essence of democracy. This includes a referendum. Even though, perhaps because General Musharraf is a convinced democrat in his core, the run-up is being handled like an electoral campaign. The president is on the