IN our historical experience it has been common enough for politicians to desert the party under whose banner they had contested and won election to an assembly and join the ranks of another in response to the call of money and power or that of personal loyalty to a factional leader. Just recently ten members of the National Assembly, elected as PPP candidates, entered a coalition, led by Zafarullah Khan Jamali (PML-Q), and thus enabled him to form a government at the centre.

This is an intriguing development. The group is lead by Faisal Saleh Hayat, a PPP old-timer, known to have been close to Benazir Bhutto, and once a minister in her government. Apparently, he and his associates in this venture have acted in violation of their parliamentary party’s policy and plans. They take the curious position that they have not left their party, that they want to liberate it from the shackles in which its current managers have confined it, and that they have acted to help the democratic process go forward, and not for personal gain.

These claims are not credible. Faisal and his associates are defectors. Six of them have been rewarded with ministerial offices and ways may be found to reward the rest. This is indisputably political corruption. It does not matter who took the initiative: whether Mr Jamali, with the concurrence of General Musharraf, approached and seduced these men, or whether they offered themselves to be seduced. The blame for this reprehensible transaction will ultimately be placed at the general’s door. Observers will not fail to point out that the anti-defection provisions in the Constitution (Article 63-A) have deliberately been kept in abeyance to allow dirty games to be played.

Parts of the Constitution currently in abeyance are expected to become operative after the Senate elections have been held. It may be argued that the act of defection under discussion will not invite the prescribed penalties because it was performed at a time when the relevant constitutional provisions were inoperative.

But what happens after the Constitution has been fully restored? Can the defectors remain PPP members and yet avoid the party’s discipline? What will they do if the party initiates a “no-confidence” move and orders them to vote against the government? Or if it instructs them to oppose a budget-related bill sponsored by the treasury. Under the Constitution, as amended by General Musharraf, these are the situations in which assembly members must follow their party’s guidelines.

It is not entirely clear what the legal status of a “forward bloc” is, especially if the parent party disowns it. Do the bloc makers retain their membership of the party, and that of the assembly, even if they disregard party discipline? Does the Election Commission recognize a “forward bloc” within a party as a legitimate entity that may continue to be treated as a part of the disowning parent organization? Those with greater expertise in the law will doubtless have more to say on the subject, but my own impression is that forward blocs of the kind under consideration here are not legitimate, and that they cannot escape the penalties the Constitution provides for defection.

Let us now look at this development from a pragmatic standpoint, and ask why Mr Jamali had to offer the PPP defectors as many as six posts (reportedly three full ministers and three ministers of state). If Faisal demanded six slots with a “take-it-or-leave-it” attitude, Jamali could have rejected it. He did not have to have the assurance of a majority in hand before General Musharraf would call the assembly to session. He could have gone in and said to the members: “let’s put a government in place and designate a prime minister whom the general can swear in.”

If, even after a week or so of negotiations, the assembly remained deadlocked, the resulting blame would have gone largely to the politicians. But a deadlock need not have developed, for the politicians would have known that their failure would force the general to send them back to another round of elections. That unwelcome prospect would surely have spurred the politicians to make mutual concessions and come up with a government. PML (Q), being the largest group in the assembly, could easily have attained a predominant position in it.

There is a simpler, but extremely disconcerting, explanation that should also be mentioned even as we hope that it is not correct. It is possible that Jamali thinks, and contrary to all expectation the general has embraced the view, that a bit of bribe to assembly members is acceptable if it appears to be necessary to obtain and keep their support for maintaining a stable government, which is a public good. Since the end is proper the means, even if wicked, should not detract from the essential virtue of the act.

Apart from the fact that this reasoning is specious, it is not just a “bit” of corruption that is involved here. Six ministerial jobs to a group of ten and promises of reward to the remaining four is corruption on a massive scale. But wait; there is more on the way. According to a report in Dawn a couple of weeks ago, the favour done to the PPP dissidents has made the legislators of Mr Jamali’s own party restive and given them a sense of deprivation.

His government was recently said to be contemplating a hundred or so positions of ministerial rank to be distributed among his party members and others to keep their support. The general did his part to help by splitting the federal government into thirty-two divisions, each one of which could have a minister, a minister of state, and a parliamentary secretary.

According to reports in this newspaper, Mr Jamali’s government at the centre and Mr Pervez Elahi’s government in Punjab have decided to place ten million rupees in development funds at the disposal of each MNA and MPA. These measures will corrupt the entire political wing of our government. The prime minister or the president will then have no moral authority to ask other officials to abstain from graft, nepotism, misappropriation of public funds, and other similar malpractices.

We may ask as Allama Iqbal once did: “chun kufr as ka’ba barkhezad, kuja manad musalmani”? (when paganism arises from the House of God itself, where then is Islam to be found?) The nation has accepted General Pervez Musharraf as president principally because it regards him as an honest man, and as one whose heart is in the right place. It expects that, as overseer-in-chief, he will not only ensure efficient planning and implementation of public policy but also safeguard honesty and probity in government.

This is a mission that he must not take lightly. He and we have an opportunity once again to start with a clean slate; let him not fritter it away as several of his predecessors had done. If he will allow the poisonous weeds of political corruption once again to grow tall around us, why has he been denouncing Benazir Bhuto, Nawaz Sharif, and their partners in plunder?

Parties are essential to the working of a parliamentary democracy and so is their good order. Whatever the motives behind its first adoption, the Fourteenth Amendment, in its present revised form, admits the claims of conscience and, at the same time, saves the parties in the assembly from falling apart. It is well to bear in mind also that while some of our people will elect a person to an assembly because of his own personal identity and qualifications, many others vote for a candidate primarily because he is the nominee of a specific party.

This is likely to be the case with voters who support parties such as the Jamaat-i-Islami, JUI. PPP, and MQM, among others. In these instances if an elected person switches affiliation from one party to another, he betrays the trust of his constituents and demolishes the very basis on which he had been elected. Defectors, if they had contested the election as nominees of a party, deserve to be expelled from the assembly.

Politics is often said to be a dirty business. Yet, in the classical tradition it is the noblest of professions. It is dirty when its practitioners seek, first and foremost, self-aggrandizement; it is noble when they are moved by a desire to serve the people and implement their vision of a good society. Examples of the second type are not limited to the pious caliphate in early Islam. There is admittedly corruption in high places in America and Europe. But it is also a fact that many Americans and Europeans (from amongst businessmen, industrialists, bankers, corporate executives, lawyers) give up far more lucrative stations to accept positions in public service.

Like some of our own virtuous rulers in the very old days, they end up losing money as a result of accepting public office. Persons of the same mould do occasionally surface in our society even now. Politics that is relatively clean, and dedicated to public service, should not be dismissed as an impossible goal for us. But no progress toward its attainment can be made unless those at the helm make a commitment to pursue it and, as a first step, wash their hands and keep them clean.

What will happen if Mr Jamali makes it known that he is recruiting support to serve the public good, but that he won’t pay for it in terms of money, jobs, and privileges? He can say also that if he cannot have support on that basis he would rather not be the prime minister. And if someone who takes his place adopts the same position, we may come close to seeing a substantial diminution, if not the end, of political corruption.

e-mail: syed.anwar@attbi.com

THE rules of politics haven’t changed in Musharraf’s newfangled democracy. Every card — racial, religious, regional or plain bluff — is being played, and that too from the bottom of the pack. The players have learnt new tricks but no lessons.

In the contest spread over three years between the “agencies” and the politicians, the casualty has been the party system. In a more unequal contest between the “bureaus” and the civil services, the traditional institutions of public administration have weakened to near extinction while the new ones created to replace them have yet to find their bearings.

With internal feuds and external threats abounding, these were the taxing times even for the established institutions and experienced men. Here both are new, untried and, worse, lacking harmony and even pulling in opposite directions. The Musharraf government chose a time for experiments in governance when the need was for continuity and strengthening the existing structures and practices, even if they were of colonial origin.

Against this backdrop, for Zafarullah Jamali to run a parliamentary government according to its accepted norms will be a Herculean task. He is the prime minister but not the leader of the majority party in the parliament. The coalition he leads comprises not like-minded parties but defectors from disparate groups. They have all come together to secure power and positions which eluded them in their own parties. In that they are succeeding — six out of ten who came from the PPP have become ministers. More poised to come or being wooed will exact a similar price. The country will thus be saddled with a cabinet of a size it neither needs nor can afford and yet must suffer to sustain the new-found democratic order.

A cabinet government to function successfully must have cohesion of thought and policy. It should not be a coalition constantly on the course of collision. The tribal bravado and bonhomie that Jamali displays in ample measure would not long save the patchwork cabinet from falling apart unless he follows, and also makes his colleagues follow, some simple but essential rules of cabinet functions and responsibility. Some may be set out here briefly.

First, all important decisions must be made in the cabinet. For that the cabinet should meet once in a week on a fixed day at a fixed time. The weekly meeting may not be put off on the pretext of lack of agenda. If there is no other business the ministers should report what they had been doing during the week. The cabinet meeting, like the question hour in the parliament, takes precedence over tours and all other duties in every parliamentary government. Here both are taken casually.

Secondly, in a cabinet, it is a universal rule, the prime minister is the first among the equals. Here every previous prime minister thought he was its master. Some treated it with outright disdain. Ministers mostly cowered or cringed. It provided jest to the public when a prime minister refused even to recognize one of his ministers at the end of his term.

Thirdly, the summaries for the cabinet, as also for the prime minister, must contain all the views expressed in the course of examining a proposal coming up for approval. Sometimes a lowly official is more outspoken and truthful than his big boss, for his own stake is lower. A secretary becoming an OSD is a catastrophe, for a section officer it is of little consequence.

Fourthly, where the secretary and his minister differ, the decision should lie with the prime minister. At present, the secretary and lower officials would rather agree with the minister than get overruled and yet earn his displeasure. Further, the minister should have no hand in the selection of the secretary of his ministry. Beneath the harmony on the surface might lie collusion if the two are friends. Z.A. Bhutto, Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto might not have come to the tragic or sad end they did or, for that matter, Musharraf would not have stumbled all the way, if the chief officials around them were neither their gurus nor their disciples.

The levers of day-to-day power lie in the Rules of Business; the Constitution comes into play only in a national crisis. Over the years these rules have been repeatedly amended to admit of greater discretion and authority for individuals. The new government would do well to revert to the rules of business and conduct under which the prime minister, the cabinet and the bureaucracy operated in the first decade of independence. The would prevent both the concentration of authority and its abuse.

The office of the prime minister is functional, ceremony being left to the head of state. Yet living in abject poverty, the people of Pakistan are compelled to keep their prime minister in an expanse of luxury unmatched by the rich of the world. That has been Mr. Jamali’s inheritance but he can help restore the informal, popular image of the office of the prime minister by doing away with his military staff. Liaquat Ali Khan did not have a military secretary, not even an aide-de-camp.

At 10 Downing Street the only man seen in uniform is a Bobby who does not even come to attention when the British prime minister arrives or leaves. The departure of the army men from the prime minister’s house will also symbolize our urge to keep the army and civil establishments apart. Many more who have found their way into the civil government may follow.

The effectiveness of the Jamali administration will be severely impaired by the fact that it is led by ministers and advisers who are born of bargaining rather than being there in their own right. These numerous men chosen for their political and not mental worth will be joining a gridlock of governments created by Musharraf’s NRB in which too many ministers, nazims, councillors, their deputies and henchmen will be chasing too little public money.

The dole has already begun. Without a straitjacket of rules and institutional control it would all end in duplication, waste and inevitable corruption. Non-political men of decent competence appointed as governors in provinces other than their own could oversee and warn even if they are not permitted to intervene to stop it.

This litany must end on the plea that at least the office of the governor should be spared the base touch of partisan politics. Jamali’s tribal instinct, as distinct from his political interest, should be able to see its advantage.

THE daily haemorrhage of Palestinian lives and property accelerates without respite. Both the Arab and western media report horrifically sensational suicide bombings, complete with pictures and names of the victims as well as gut-wrenching details. I do not hesitate now to say again that these efforts are morally repugnant and politically disastrous on all sorts of grounds.

But what I find just as awful is the fact that Israel kills a far larger number of mostly unarmed Palestinian civilians — a 90-year-old man here, a whole family there, a mentally disabled youth today, a nurse yesterday, and so on — and refuses to stop or in any way place restrictions on its troops who have visited mayhem on the Palestinians unremittingly for far too many recent months.

Most of the time, however, these dreadful slaughters are reported on the back pages of newspapers, and never mentioned on TV. As for the continued practice of extra-legal assassinations, Israel is allowed to get away with phrases from journalists who use words like “alleged” or “officials say” to cover their own irresponsibility as reporters. The New York Times in particular is now so clotted with such phrases in reporting on the Middle East (Iraq included) that it might as well be re-named “Officials Said.”

In other words, the fact that illegal Israeli practices continue to deliberately bleed the Palestinian civilian population is obscured, hidden from view, though it continues steadily all the time. Sixty-five per cent unemployment, 50 per cent poverty (people living on less than two dollars a day), schools, hospitals, universities, businesses under constant military pressure: these are only the outward manifestation of Israeli crimes against humanity. Over 40 per cent of the Palestinian population is malnourished, and famine is now a genuine threat to the entire society.

Non-stop curfews, the endless expropriation of land and the building of settlements (now numbering almost 200), the destruction of crops, trees, houses have made life for ordinary Palestinians intolerable. Many are leaving, or as is the case with inhabitants of Yanun village, must leave because settlers’ terror against them, the burning of their houses, and threats against their lives make it impossible to stay.

Why this kind of arrogance goes unanswered or is not immediately associated with the kind of thing for which Slobodan Milosevic is now being tried for in The Hague, is a sign of how mendacious the international community has become. With US cover, Sharon kills Palestinians at will under the guise of fighting terrorism.

Were this not bad enough, there is in addition the sorry state of Palestinian and Arab politics, many of its leaders and elites never more corrupt, rarely more injurious to their people as now. Neither collectively nor individually have these people put up any systematic strategy, much less even a systematic protest against the US’s announced plans to redraw the map of the Middle East after the invasion of Iraq. All these regimes can do now seems to be either to market themselves as indispensable to the US or to suppress any sign of dissent in their midst. Or both together.

The unseemly bickering and disorderliness of the Iraqi opposition in London — under the watchful eye of the US’s Zalmay Khalilzad, an AUB graduate, once a neighbour of mine in New York, now a neo-conservative protege of Cheney and Wolfowitz — gives an excellent idea of where we are as a people. Representatives who represent only themselves, the condescending imperial patronage of a power that is about to destroy a country in order to grab its resources, the tyrannical, discredited local regimes (of which Saddam’s is the worst) ruling by terror, the absence of any semblance of democracy within, and without, such regimes — these are not reassuring prospects for the future.

Everything in the Arab world is done either from above by basically unelected rulers or behind a curtain by undesignated albeit resourceful middlemen. Resources are bartered or sold without accountability; political futures are designed for the convenience of the powerful and their local sub-contractors; human compassion and care for the citizens’ wellbeing have few institutions to nurture them.

The Palestinian situation embodies all this with startling drama. As the culmination of its 35-year-old military occupation, the Israeli army has spent the last nine months destroying the rudimentary infrastructure of civilian life on the West Bank and in Gaza: people there, in effect, live in cages, with electrical and concrete fences or Israeli troops to guard and interdict their free movement.

Yasir Arafat and his men, who are at least as responsible for the current paralysis and devastation because of what they signed away in Oslo, and for having given legitimacy to the Israeli occupation, seem to be hanging on anyway, even as extraordinary stories of their corruption and illegally acquired wealth dribble out all over the Israeli, Arab and international media. It is deeply troubling that many of these men have recently been involved in secret negotiations with the EU, with the CIA, with the Scandinavian countries on the basis of their former credibility as surrogates and servants of Arafat.

What could be more preposterous than the call for Palestinian elections, which Mr. Arafat of all people, imprisoned in an Israeli vise, announces, retracts, postpones, and re-announces. Everyone speaks of reform except the very people whose future depends on it — the citizens of Palestine who have endured and sacrificed so much even as their impoverishment and misery increases all the time. Isn’t it ironic that in the name of that long-suffering people, schemes of rule are being hatched everywhere, except by the people themselves?

Surely the Swedes, the Spanish, the British, the Americans and even the Israelis know perfectly that the symbolic key to the future of the Middle East is Palestine, and that is why they do everything within their power to make sure that the Palestinian people are kept as far away from decisions about the future as possible. And this during a heated campaign for war against Iraq, for which numerous Americans, Europeans and Israelis have openly stated that this is the time to re-draw the map of the Middle East and bring in “democracy.”

The time has come for the emperor who claims to be wearing new clothes, which he calls democracy, should be exposed for the charlatan he really is. Democracy cannot be imported or imposed: it is the prerogative of citizens who can make it and desire to live under it. Ever since the end of World War II, the Arab countries have been living in various states of “emergency,” which has been a licence for their rulers to do what they want in the name of security. Even the Palestinians under Oslo had a regime imposed on them that existed first of all to serve Israel’s security, and second, to serve (and help) itself.

For all sorts of reasons, among them that the cause of Palestine (like the liberation of apartheid South Africa) has always served as a model for Arabs and fair-minded idealistic people everywhere, it is today imperative that Palestinians take steps right now to restore the fashioning of their destiny to their own hands.

The political stage in Palestine is now divided between two unattractive and unviable alternatives. On one side, there is what is left of the Authority and Arafat. On the other side are the Islamic parties. Neither one nor the other can possibly secure a decent future for the citizens of Palestine. The Authority is so discredited, its failure to build institutions so basic, its corrupt and cynical history so compromised in every way as to render it incapable of being entrusted with the future. Only rogues will pretend otherwise, as some of its security chiefs and prominent negotiators are now pretending.

As for the Islamic parties, they lead desperate individuals into a negative space of endless religious strife and anti-modern decline. If we speak of Zionism as having failed politically and socially, how can it be acceptable to turn passively to another religion and look there for worldly salvation? Impossible. Human beings make their own history, not gods or magic or miracles. Purifying the land of “aliens”, whether it is spoken of by Muslims, Christians or Jews, is a defilement of human life as it is lived by billions of people who are mixed by race, history, ethnic identity, religion or nationality.

But a large majority of Palestinians and, I think, Israelis know these things. And fortunately a political alternative already exists that is neither Hamas nor Arafat’s Authority. I am speaking here of an impressive formation of Palestinians in the occupied territories who in June of this year announced a new Palestinian national initiative (moubadara wataniya). Among its leaders are Dr. Mustafa Barghuti and Dr. Haidar Abdel Shafi, Rawia al Shawa, and many more independents who understand that in its weakened state, Palestinian society is being targeted for “reform” by parties whose real interest is to liquidate Palestine as a political and moral force for years to come.

Idle talk of elections by Arafat and his lieutenants is meant to reassure outsiders that democracy is on the way. Far from it, since these people simply want to continue their corrupt and bankrupt ways by any means possible, including outright fraud. The 1996 elections, it should be remembered, were conducted on the basis of the Oslo process, whose main aim was to continue Israeli occupation under a different title. The Legislative Assembly was in reality powerless before both Arafat’s edict and the Israeli veto. What Sharon and the Quartet now propose is an extension of the same unacceptable regime.— Copyright 2002, Edward W. Said