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