MANY of our elite profess to stand for parliamentary democracy, federalism, provincial autonomy, decentralization of authority to the “grass roots,” and, in moments of greater enthusiasm, “all power to the people.” Our journey in this general direction has been made arduous not only because there are pockets of open opposition to this agenda, but because even some of its proponents are haunted by inner doubts. Overt and covert believers in authoritarianism and centralization, proceeding either from an ideological persuasion or from their interpretation of our historical experience and culture, abound.

One of the numerous amendments to the Constitution that the present government has proposed relates to the maintenance of party discipline in parliament. It merits attention. In the National Reconstruction Bureau’s version of the existing Fourteenth Amendment, a member may lose his seat if the leader of his party in parliament reports to the presiding officer that the member concerned has become a “defector,” and if the election commission confirms that the same has indeed taken place. Defection will be deemed to have happened if the member has left his party, voted contrary to its direction on any issue before the house, or even if he has abstained from voting altogether. He may speak against his party’s stance, but he may not vote against it.

A few explanatory observations may be useful before we examine the NRB’s case. Stable grouping of members in the legislature may be helpful in the efficient conduct of business but it is not essential in a presidential system. The executive may have preferences with regard to legislation under consideration, but it is responsible for executing the laws, whatever they be, not for making them. If the legislature rejects its preferences, it may be resentful but it stays in office. In other words, it does not need the support of a legislative majority to remain in office.

In a parliamentary system, on the other hand, the authority to govern — both legislative and executive-resides in parliament. The “executive” (prime minister and his cabinet), being a committee of the parliament itself, is a recipient of delegated authority; the parliament remains the principal, the cabinet its agent. The agent must have the principal’s continuing support and confidence to keep its commission. Hence the need for an institutionalized stable group of members, constituting a majority of the house, that will consistently support the prime minister and his cabinet and thus sustain them in office. This arrangement and the resulting stability of the executive have been accomplished by organizing the houses of parliament along party lines.

In most of the well-established parliamentary systems tradition, not law, requires a member to remain faithful to the party from whose platform he had been elected. Change of party loyalty or “crossing the floor,” as it is called, is rare and considered disreputable when it does occur. It may well bring about the end of one’s political career. In recent British history, Winston Churchill was one of the few politicians who survived party switches-from Conservative to Liberal and then back to Conservative.

In Pakistan, the tradition of steadfast loyalty to one’s party has never really taken hold. Persons attach themselves to a party either because its interpretations of the public interest and general orientation appeal to them, or because they think their alignment with it will improve their chances of winning an election. Commitment to the public interest or any of its particular versions is a minor consideration.

Victory is sought primarily for personal gratification, which will come within - reach more likely if the party of one’s choice has become the ruling party. Intellectual and/or emotional satisfactions, and even some small material benefits, may come one’s way even as a member of the opposition, but then one may also have to contend with the risk of punishment at the hands of the ruling party.

Dedication to one’s party is not an unknown commodity in Pakistani politics, as the PPP’s continued viability, despite Ziaul Haq’s intense persecution visited upon it, would attest. Similar evidence can be found in the experience of the ANP and the Jamaat-i-Islami. But infirmity of party allegiance and opportunistic shifts of support are also common enough to pose serious problems for political stability. We all know about “horse trading” which thrives when no party emerges from an election with a solid majority in the house or when the majority status of the ruling party or coalition is precarious.

What is then to be done? Our political culture has not absorbed the value of party loyalty to the point where the voting public, or even the leading politicians, will disown defectors. There are two ways of going about it. One is to allow time for the right kind of tradition to develop. If a ruling party prefers losing power to going out and buying support, its stock with the people would probably rise, and it might reap the reward at the next election. The other way is to have recourse to the law via the Fourteenth Amendment.

The problem with this amendment is that it ignores altogether the issue of conscience. What is a member to do if he believes that his party’s position on a given subject is immoral and/or contrary to the public interest? This dilemma is not entirely new. The well-known English political theorist, John Stuart Mill (1805-1873), tried to resolve it by suggesting that the member concerned might speak against his party’s stance on the floor of the house but, having done so, he should vote with his party.

With or without acquaintance with Mill, General Naqvi of NRB would allow a dissenter to speak against his party’s policy but require him to vote as directed by his party leader. Since the dictate of conscience and the maintenance of party discipline in parliament are both desirable for the good of the order, the dissenting member might simply resign his seat in parliament.

None of these “solutions” makes an adequate distinction between defection and failure to vote with one’s party on a given issue. Defection normally means that a member has broken away from his party and joined another on a permanent or long-term basis. Remaining within the party, voting with it most of the time, but disagreeing with it once in a while is something quite different. The least we can do by way of showing respect for conscience is to let the member concerned abstain from voting (except when the occasion calls for a formal vote of confidence in the government of the day) without being judged as a defector and expelled.

Proponents of the Fourteenth Amendment assume that voters elect a person to parliament solely because of his alignment with a political party of their preference, but that his own relationship and standing with them plays no part in his election. This is simply not the case in many of our constituencies. A party leader’s authority to throw out a dissenter implies scant regard for the people’s right to choose their representatives. Consider also the likelihood that Mr Nawaz Sharif, who sponsored this amendment in the first place, was more interested in enhancing his own despotic control over his party than he was in promoting the good order of parliament.

Many of our politicians, especially those from the smaller provinces, have been alleging that the proposed amendments will further weaken the state as a federal union. The greatest danger in this regard arises from a mindset that we have inherited from the early modern western thinking which stressed the need for a “strong centre” to preserve a state that contained diverse elements. The disintegration of highly centralized but diverse political unions during the last few decades has shown this idea to be inefficacious, but the system builders in Pakistan have yet to accept this lesson of history.

The central government’s authority to dismiss provincial governments and impose its own rule over the provinces, and its appropriation of much of the government’s regulatory jurisdiction and sources of revenue have been the traditional instruments of central control. It is not entirely clear how the proposed amendments will further increase centralization. That will indeed happen if the central government’s involvement with the newly instituted system of district administration is constitutionally validated. There is no rational reason for this involvement and it should be opposed.

The central government’s authority to appoint officials to higher-ranking positions in the provincial governments should also go. The centre should be “strong” in the sense of being competent and effective within its own jurisdiction, but that jurisdiction should be limited to functions which the provincial governments cannot, each on its own, perform. Powers and functions not specifically assigned to the central government should be deemed as belonging to the provinces.

It is said that the amendments will increase Punjab’s presence in parliament and thus the danger of its exploitative dominance over the smaller provinces. As I have argued before, the answer to the Punjabi threat (insofar as it does exist) lies in giving all of our provinces equal representation in the Senate and giving the Senate equal powers with the National Assembly. Nothing should become law unless it is passed by the Senate where the smaller provinces can defeat any exploitative designs that Punjab may have.

One of the proposed amendments would empower the Supreme Judicial Council to act on its own initiative to deal with wrongdoing within the judiciary. During the last thirty years the Council has done little to eradicate corruption among judges or to control their urges to enlarge their jurisdiction. While we are at it, we should place a clause or two in the Constitution to provide for the impeachment of higher-ranking judges when it is so warranted.

A TONGUE-IN-CHEEK comment often made when the eastern wing of the country broke away towards the end of 1971 was that it was the price paid for holding the nation’s first free and fair elections.

A view more seriously then held and officially encouraged was that the elections were neither free nor fair. It was Mujib’s armed thugs who had intimidated the people into voting for the secessionist Awami League. The unrest that preceded the elections and the insurgency that followed resulting in the military surrender in Dhaka were attributed not to popular discontent but to the Hindu intrigue and Indian invasion.

Some bizarre suggestions emanating from the tragedy of 1971 were that the elections in the country should be always controlled or rigged, the defiant elements should be kept out of the contest and, most grotesque of all, the rulers and not the masses know what is in the best interest of the country and who can be best trusted to safeguard it.

The time and events have proved wrong all these views and assumptions. Bangladesh has not fallen under Indian hegemony nor is any remorse felt there on breaking away from Pakistan. The Islamic fighters, artificially sustained, have melted into Bangladesh’s Muslim but secular milieu. A few hundred thousand who continued to profess allegiance to Pakistan are now resigned to die in despair. Their fetid slums in Bangladesh in which a whole new generation has grown up in statelessness stand as monuments of shame to all those who then shed blood for the glory of Islam and the integrity of Pakistan.

The stranded Pakistanis used to stand up with placards beseeching for repatriation whenever a head of state or government from Pakistan visited Dhaka. On President Musharraf’s recent visit they didn’t do even that. The painful ritual had become utterly futile.

Now, almost thirty-two years after the creation of Bangladesh even the blustering patriots of that time concede that had the power been transferred through the parliament to the winning party, Pakistan would have stayed together or, at least, the bloodshed that accompanied the separation could have been avoided.

The events of the early seventies may be distant bearing no resemblance to the situation of today but the lessons they contain can be ignored at our own peril. The first is that the elections are rigged only if the authority at the top so desires or directs. The second lesson is that a small minority howsoever fanatical in character and bolstered by the government, cannot deliver.

In the elections of 1970 the administration did not choose the candidates nor backed one or the other party. No one tampered with the ballot nor falsified the results because President Yahya did not ask for it. The election commission, the returning officers and the polling staff, the deputy commissioners and the police did their job unmindful of who would win and who would loses. Personal likes or dislikes of an official made but little difference for he could not persuade or compel his colleagues to stick their necks out for his favourite candidate.

President Musharraf now concedes that some officials conducting his referendum may have overstated the numbers in their zeal to please him and some others stuffed the boxes to defame him, but it was not his administration’s policy to interfere in the process nor was he personally aware of it. The conduct of the polling officials can thus be explained but not that of the election commission which conducted the process.

To dispel the referendum shadow hanging over the impartiality of President Musharraf and his administration, some measures are needed to assure the people that the forthcoming elections wouldn’t suffer the same fate. The first is to have a new election commission. If for some mysterious reason the commission must consist of judges only, it should be given an experienced and conscientious administrator as its secretary.

Second, the election cells said to be working already in the offices of the president and the governors should be disbanded. Third, to relieve tension and allay fears of boycott or disruption or legal challenge, a national consensus should be forged on Musharraf remaining president for the first parliamentary term and his chief opponents - Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif — staying out of the parliament.

All others, except for the convicted felons, should be eligible to contest. The president is mistaken if he thinks that the Q-rump of the Muslim League would give him greater loyalty and strength than the other parties. They will be all too eager to have his goodwill to form the government.

Another set of measures, more in the nature of policy decisions, would be needed to make the federation work without duress or much dissent. It was suggested earlier but bears repetition that the president and the prime minister at one time should not come from the same province. It rings a bell of danger that in 55 years not one head of state or government has come from Balochistan. Secondly, the governors should belong to a province other than their own. The governor’s role should be essentially administrative, not political.

Thirdly, the president should be restrained from abusing his powers in the same manner as is envisaged for the prime minister. That is a lesson from the Zia-Junejo diarchy of the eighties. Zia, like Musharraf, promised that he would play more golf and interfere less with the executive functions of the prime minister. That didn’t come easy to him nor in all probability would it to Musharraf. Zia’s interference ranged from reprimanding Junejo for appointing an Ahmadi as a secretary to pestering him for extension in service to a cook. He dissolved the assembly and dismissed Junejo not for malfeasance but for ‘disobedience’.

Fourthly, the image and authority of the Musharraf government has been diminished by giving in too often and too readily to the militants and reactionaries to the humiliation and hurt of much larger and law-abiding communities. To appease doesn’t pay. What is wrong must be rejected.

Finally, no administration can run on the strength of the police and taxmen alone. A constitutionally protected administrative service should be created by drawing men - 500 or so - at all levels on merit alone from all services, including the police and the army. Merit should be determined by extended written, oral and psychological tests. The top twenty in the entry competitive examinations held annually should be inducted into this service. The DMG was bad, now it is worse. The new service can be shaped in the image of the legendary ICS and not its diminished successors.

All that has been suggested here may not be palatable or suit the government or all the politically contentious elements but to say nothing or to do nothing is not an option at this critical stage.

IS THE US, however reluctantly, returning to a semblance of normality? Every nation naturally rallies around their flag when under dire threat and prizes security over liberty. Yet the hyper-patriotic atmosphere after September 11 - avidly exploited by the Republican administration - is ebbing.

Despite robust elements in the Bush administration who apparently aim at nothing less than a fascist national security state, there are strong signs of renewed dissent and public debate. The Bush administration’s best-laid plans at last are running into resistance as financial scandals mount, and citizens watch their civil liberties being stripped away in exchange for what officials admit are empty promises of perfect safety.

Bush’s artificially sky-high approval ratings, accordingly, have fallen into the high or mid-’60s, depending on the poll. His own alleged financial high jinks are attracting extremely discomfiting attention - attention that his business dealings failed to draw in the infamous 2000 election.

His father’s ignominious plummet from a high 90s ratings in the 1991 Gulf war aftermath to electoral defeat in 1992 cannot be far from his troubled mind. Of course, one should not overrate this encouraging democratic trend; there wasn’t much dissent in mainstream American media in the first place.

The quick triumph in Afghanistan redounded to the benefit of formerly intimidated critics and to anyone else who harboured any misgivings about the free-wheeling unilateral US agenda. The suspicion arises that a foe so easily defeated - or dispersed - may not justify a defence budget that merrily outspent the next 18 countries combined. The ragtag enemy may not even warrant the added 45 billion dollars Bush allocated, which alone exceed the defence budgets of most nations, while average Americans are deprived of national health care and public amenities routinely available in other industrial societies.

Tax breaks and state grants spill lavishly into corporate coffers, especially the big airlines after 9/11, but nothing trickled into the pockets of laid-off employees. Here was Bush’s ‘compassionate conservatism’ remorselessly at work. Americans slowly take notice that the dividends of their righteous war on terrorism flow straight into megacorporate accounts which, as we all have seen confirmed lately, are none too trustworthy.

In the Afghan aftermath Secretary of State Colin Powell was bemused that the US suddenly had acquired unprecedented military and economic access to energy-rich Central Asia, despite this being a long-sought policy objective. The press played along with the disingenuous impression that it was mere serendipity that carved out this new US influence. Yet it is not entirely lost on the American public that the quest for control of energy resources underlay the revenge mission for the 9/11 attacks. Revenge is sweet, but wealth and dominance indisputably are sweeter.

This dominance includes cowing the home front. After helping oust a talk show host who dared criticize Bush, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer ominously said that Americans “must watch what they say” and implied that there were no longer any legitimate grounds for dissent.

With the aid of draconian legislation that Bush happened to have on hand after 9/11, American secret police agencies - notorious for earlier abuses of power - were untethered from democratic oversight in order to do what they please not only to foreigners (who constitutionally enjoy American rights) but citizens too. Dan Rather, an iconic American news anchor, confessed to the British press that the domestic jingoistic climate discouraged the press from asking questions about the war on terrorism (itself an undeclared war) on behalf of the puzzled public who, after all, were footing all the bills.

Even an ordinarily docile American press could not help noting that President Bush and Vice-President Cheney staged an alarmist announcement of a ‘dirty nuclear bomb’ plot on the day that an FBI whistleblower testified in Congress as to endemic slip-ups in intelligence work, and to the irrelevance of the drastic security measures the administration installed. The ‘dirty bomb’ culprit, already in custody more than a month, was trotted out as a desperate distraction from the multitude of flaws, scams, and foibles emerging about the conduct of Bush’s pious administration.

Cracks widen in the fragile post-9/11 American “patriotic” consensus as the horrid Middle East crisis rampages on. A major TV news anchor, Ted Koppel, recently was escorted around Ramallah by accommodating Israelis, clearly fretful about their international image, who had the sorry task of explaining why even the local post office was pulverized. Well, you see, it might serve as enemy infrastructure. If so, just who was not an Israeli enemy?

Americans of Vietnam war vintage recall very well what happens when military policy operates as if there are no civilians. Uneasiness grows. Indeed, American support for a Palestinian state increased from 52 per cent before the second intifada commenced to nearly 60 per cent today, according to polls. Even media mogul Ted Turner said that Middle East news coverage has been inexcusably one-sided.

Bush miserably failed to sell his Iraqi invasion scheme to the wary Europeans, especially the Germans, who greeted him with mass demonstrations for justice in Palestine. After Bush’s speech insisting that Arafat be deposed, even European ally Tony Blair was nudged by anger inside his own party to distance himself from Bush’s “a terrorist is anyone I say is a terrorist” mantra. Blair’s wife Cherie ignited a right-wing media storm when she remarked that suicide bombing was unlikely to stop until the hideous conditions that bred hopelessness and rage were treated, but a majority of British citizens agree with her.

Every European government opposes terrorism but they are not inclined to allow this sensible stance to hook them into Bush’s blinkered agenda. Also, under Israeli onslaughts, the Palestinians are gaining support in European public opinion. Bush can’t muzzle the Europeans.

The April 20 rally in Washington DC by over a hundred thousand demonstrators on behalf of Palestinian rights was another invigorating sign. The New York Post predictably dismissed participants as nothing but a bunch of “raging grannies, ageing hippies, and assorted malcontents. The few placards depicting Ariel Sharon with a smudged Hitler moustache were excessive but who, come to think of it, has done more lately to stir up anti-Semitism?

The holocaust, oddly, has enabled unscrupulous Israeli leaders to commit almost any crime short of genocide and have it excused or overlooked. Even Israeli soldiers - whose refusenik ranks are growing - have shuddered at disturbing similarities between IDF actions and those of Panzergrenadiers. Street demonstrations by brave Israeli dissenters have increased latitude for dissent elsewhere. Even Al Gore, itching for another crack at the presidency which the Supreme Court snatched from him, is finally attacking Bush’s short-sighted policies.

Attorney-General John Ashcroft’s antics are redolent more of a Grand Vizier or Russian czar than of the chief legal officer in the land. In half a dozen cases, thus far, the lower courts reversed his US Patriot Act rulings as flagrantly unconstitutional. The appalling corporate accounting scandals creep ever closer to Bush and his associates. Unemployment at 6 per cent is at its highest point since 1992 and it is hard for Americans who aren’t filthy rich to see what Bush is doing for them other than trying to scare them out of their wits. This cliche of a tactic scaled the heights of black comedy when Cheney blithely asserted that Americans must sacrifice their civil liberties for safety and, on the other hand, trumpeted that Al Qaeda attacks were imminent anyhow. The contradiction did not escape all viewers.

Although there are not many visible demonstrations in Muslim countries, this absence does not mean that Bush and allied regimes have captured their political support or acquiescence. The masses are “eating sorrows” as a Greek poet put it, which, if ongoing arrogant trends go unchanged, may explode in terrible revolts from Saudi Arabia to Egypt, which will endanger energy installations, upset American hegemonic schemes, and adversely affect the economy of the entire developed world.

What does the future offer? The Bush administration desperately desires to send out a melodramatic series of terrorist alarms so as to keep the public trembling and pliable through the congressional elections this November, and then to repeat this venerable formula in the 2004 Bush re-election campaign. Especially as scandals and scepticism burgeon, we can expect Bush administration operatives to squeal all the more loudly that the sky is falling and that their critics solely are to blame for it.

Another successful terrorist attack would not be unwelcome inasmuch as it would help to justify their tightening grip on the suffocating body politic. Nonetheless, that grip is slipping. It may be true, as Abraham Lincoln remarked, that you can’t fool all the people all of the time, but that fact has never stopped anyone from trying.