May 28, 2003	Wednesday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 25,1424

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ISLAMABAD, May 27: The controversy over the Legal Framework Order echoed on Tuesday through a South Asian peace seminar where scholars painted a bleak picture about Pakistan’s political future because of the military dominance in the governance.

The participants criticized the LFO as well as the frequent military interventions that have interrupted the political process in the country’s 56-year history.

At the two sessions on Pakistan on the last day of the two- day seminar on “Current domestic policy challenges and prospects in South Asia”, Pakistani scholars also warned of dangers to liberalism from the political rise of religious parties in the October elections.

The Pakistani scholars’ comments matched similarly outspoken self-criticism by their Indian counterparts of the Hindu revivalism in their country in Monday’s opening session of the seminar organized by the state-funded Institute of Regional Studies as part of the peace moves between the two countries.

This gave former information minister and ruling party senator Nisar Memon, who presided over both sessions on Pakistan, an opportunity to give credit to Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali for allowing freedom of expression and press that made such criticism possible.

But a prominent economist, Shahid Hafiz Kardar, who spoke on rising poverty in the country, remarked that though there was freedom of speech, “freedom after speech could be a problem”.

Former law minister Shahida Jamil invited a barrage of questions from Indian delegates after she blamed India for most of Pakistan’s major problems.

The most scathing critique of the military’s role came from Dr Mohammad Waseem, chairman of the department of international relations at Quaid-i-Azam University, who saw civil-military relations as being tense due to events from last year’s controversial referendum on General Pervez Musharraf’s presidency to the October elections and enforcement of the LFO in November.

He said these events, including the emergence of the so-called “king’s parties”, switching of loyalties by party adherents, and alleged rigging in polls, had weakened the political parties and strengthened the role of army and bureaucracy in politics while democracy prospered in India. But he said Pakistan was still the most democratic of more than 50 Muslim countries. This view was endorsed by an Indian opposition member of parliament, Mani Shankar Aiyar.

“Having traversed a long course along imbalances of its institutions, Pakistan’s political system has now reached a point where the political role of the military is being formalized,” said Syed Jaffar Ahmad, acting director of the Pakistan Study Centre, Karachi.

He said General Musharraf undermined the parliamentary democracy’s concept by fundamental changes in the Constitution through the LFO and by holding elections under “carefully designed rules” to engineer a government of the establishment’s liking.

“Thus 56 years after independence, Pakistani political system’s perversion seems to have come full circle with military not only dominating all other institutions but now doing so apparently constitutionally,” Mr Ahmad said.

“One does not see much light at the end of the tunnel,” he remarked, but said emergence of a strong civil society could redress the situation.