IT is about a year when elections were held for the parliament that raised the hope that our democratic process would move forward, and perhaps grow in maturity. It hasn’t. The question arises: is the democratic process introduced through amendments in the Constitution flawed or is there something wrong with the parliamentary opposition that is using the floor for political protest?

The Constitution and the parliament are organically part of the same order. Both in theory and practice, the two are intrinsically intertwined. Sovereignty of the parliament cannot be established without supremacy of the Constitution, and constitutional politics wouldn’t grow without an assertive, independent or sovereign parliament. If we look at the working of both the political process and the parliament since its inauguration, it doesn’t give us much hope of any major breakthrough because of the complex issues that have created a gridlock between the treasury benches and the opposition.

The idea of opposition is central to democracy. Rather it is the test of its legitimacy and strength. Absence of opposition or its muzzling by any means would undermine the foundation of democratic process. The way our institutions and official attitudes toward politics have developed, the opposition, whosoever moves on to that side, has always been at the receiving end.

Unfortunately, it is equally true that during the musical chair decade of our politics, the oppositions didn’t play any constructive role. They spent all their time, energy and resources in undermining the sitting governments and showed no qualms in approaching the president or the military leadership in getting the governments in power removed. The idea of loyal opposition in the parliamentary form of government is about the tradition and necessity of cooperation between the majority and the minority to run the house.

The difficulty is that the concept of loyal opposition and tolerant government works only in political environments where a consensus on fundamental political values exists. By this we mean there is agreement on the basic outline of the system of governance, nature of political system and distribution of power among different organs of the state and between the centre and the provinces. In this vital area of our politics, we have constantly failed to reach consensus. First it was the problem of balancing East Pakistan’s majority through a manufactured parity, and then it was Ayub’s presidential system that nobody in the political opposition accepted. It took us quarter of a century and loss of East Pakistan before we reached a national consensus on the 1973 Constitution. If one looks at it from a purely constitutional and legalistic point of view it may appear to be greatly flawed, but that is not the criteria according to which the merits and demerits of a constitution are judged. A good Constitution is the one which has been accepted by different competing interests of society represented by political groups. Flaws, if any, get removed when the democratic process matures.

There is no doubt about the national consensus on the 1973 Constitution. With all its structural asymmetries it ensures sovereignty of the parliament, a fundamental principle of parliamentary democracy.

Trouble started when late General Ziaul Haq decided to amend the Constitution and the majority parliamentary group headed by late Mohammad Khan Junejo accepted the 8th Amendment as a quid pro quo for the restoration of democracy.

Once again we face the same dilemma. Those who are in the government think that democracy would grow and the Legal Framework Order that has restored the presidential power to dissolve the parliament doesn’t stand as a barrier. The present opposition that is stronger and quite diverse compared to the oppositions in the past stridently opposes that view. That pulls us back to the basics of democratic politics, the question of sovereignty of the parliament, the division of powers and the supremacy of the Constitution. There are no two opinions about what true parliamentary democracy means. It means all of the above.

Is there a way out? May be, may be not. If the government is willing to negotiate with utmost sincerity and shows some flexibility on the issue of uniform of the president, his re- election according to the procedures laid down in the Constitution and constitutional check against the misuse of presidential power to dissolve the parliament, an agreement can be reached with the MMA.

There are indications that the MMA will part company with the opposition, and even if it doesn’t join the government, would cooperate in giving the LFO a constitutional cover after reasonable changes. That will definitely move the political process forward. The reason why such an agreement hasn’t been reached is that the government side thinks that it can wear down the desk thumping opposition.

The opposition, particularly the parties in the Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy have a different agenda. That is how to get their leaders cleared from corruption cases through political pressure. For this they want to use their presence in the parliament to destabilize President Musharraf. Obviously, the leaders sitting abroad have bigger personal political stakes than giving Musharraf and his political allies in the Q League any chance to succeed in the interest of stability.

This primary conflict of interest between two different kinds of forces continues to undermine our political development, which is not unique to our present situation.

So we are stuck in the basics of democratic politics. Two divergent and dialectically opposite views about what type of democracy is suited for Pakistan have kept the political forces as well as the permanent establishment divided. One view of democracy is that since prerequisites of democracy are weak, a civic political culture doesn’t exist, the electoral arena is dominated by the land-owning class that is intellectually unfit to rule, the best thing is that we should have a guided or controlled democracy. That is not my view. The landed elites and others elected can at best be co-opted in power-sharing arrangements.

For this reason, practically all military governments were only military-led governments that all shades of political groups joined and continue to do so in the present setup. Only a very few individuals can claim political purity in this respect. Here political stability and economic development outweigh the argument for a democracy based on the sovereignty of the parliament.

The other view is that given the complex political heritage of the country, we must build order, stability and economic development on the solid rock of democracy. Our national salvation, prestige, and stability lie in pursuing that course. Sooner we take that course the better.

The writer is professor of political science, LUMS, Lahore.

VISITING the US while the campaign for the 2004 presidential election is building up, is a revealing experience. With nine Democratic hopefuls vying for the party’s nomination, all issues, domestic and foreign, are debated in great details, and the different approaches of the various candidates brought under scrutiny. The fist primaries are due in January, so that momentum is building up for what many anticipate will be a close contest. President Bush has already taken steps to consolidate his position.

Despite the complexity of the issues being discussed, and the divergent opinions being aired, one can identify certain broad trends that constitute pointers to the future policies of the sole superpower. Many consequences of the Bush policies, notably the war on terrorism sparked by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, will remain to be confronted. The US is militarily committed in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the nature of the resistance has compelled a re-evaluation of the policies of the Bush administration. The unilateralist approach advocated by the neo-conservatives is becoming discredited, and both internal and external critics favour a return to greater international involvement both in the war against terrorism, and the reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The quest by the Republican hardliners for total hegemony by translating US military and technical superiority into global domination ran contrary to the post-cold war trends. These included global cooperation on challenges confronting the entire world, in areas such as the environment, arms reduction and economic inequalities. New centres of economic power were emerging in Asia and Europe, and it was expected that the 21st century would leave the conflicts and strife of the 20th century behind to attend to social and economic issues.

Before that agenda could be adopted, political issues left over from the past, such as those over the rights of the Palestinians and Kashmiris would be addressed to eliminate causes of tension holding up progress in the Middle East and South Asia.

The 9/11 attacks were not totally unexpected, though the scale and losses involved had not been anticipated. The phenomenon of terrorism, which is currently traced mainly to the Islamic world, has existed over history. Many an emperor and despot was killed by disgruntled opponents. A Southerner assassinated President Abraham Lincoln, the killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria by a Serbian nationalist sparked the First World War, and political opponents assassinated great leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi in India and Yitzhak Rabin in Israel.

The process of decolonization after the Second World War consisted of liberation movements in many colonies in Asia and Africa whose leaders were dubbed as terrorists but later recognized as Presidents and Prime Ministers of new sovereign states after their struggles ended in success. Many of the top leaders of Israel had been members of such terrorist outfits as Irgun Zwai Leumi and Stern Gang before the birth of the state of Israel.

This historical background has been forgotten, and the current trend is to consider the Islamic world as the spawning ground of terrorism and to see the war on terrorism as war on Islamic fundamentalism. The perpetrators of the 9/11 terrorist outrage being Muslim Arabs, and with ongoing liberation struggles involving Muslims, such as in Palestine and Kashmir, it has suited interested parties, such as the extremist governments controlling Israel and India, to dub such movements as “terrorist”, despite the fact that the rights of these people are specifically recognized in UN resolutions.

Another anomaly in the existing perception in the US of the Islamic world as the hotbed of terrorism is that two decades ago, it was the US that encouraged and financed jihadist movements, notably in Afghanistan, because such movements could be motivated to maintain a religiously motivated struggle against the communist superpower. Once the Soviet Union withdrew, the US also ended its presence in the region.

Leaders like Osama bin Laden, who had been brought to Afghanistan to head thousands of Mujahideen assembled from all over the world were left to their own devices. Continued US support to Israel and the constant erosion of Palestinian rights led this group to turn against the US. In Iraq also, the West led by the US, had encouraged Saddam Hussein to launch a war against the Islamic Republic of Iran. He was as much an instrument of US policy as Osama was for a time.

The blame for nurturing terrorism, therefore, cannot be placed at the door of the Islamic world, or of the Islamic faith, which is a religion that encourages peace and brotherhood. As the election campaign in the US has picked up steam, several presidential candidates have questioned the approach of labelling the Islamic world as hostile. Senator Joe Lieberman, who was the running mate of presidential candidate Albert Gore in 2000, and is a Jew, has warned against the tendency to view the Islamic world in adversarial terms.

The anti-fundamentalist rhetoric that has turned into a rallying slogan under the Bush administration has a flip side to it. Despite its enormous military power, the US has not succeeded in establishing effective control over Afghanistan or Iraq. Indeed, the use of excessive force, and disregard for civilian casualties as well as for religious sensitivities, have led the US troops and their allies to be regarded not as liberators, but as occupation forces.

The Bush doctrine of pre-emption is seen by objective observers as the new imperialism. The two close strategic partners of the US, namely Israel and India, have sought to exploit the war on terrorism to suppress the Palestinian Arabs, and the Kashmiri freedom fighters through savage use of force by calling them “terrorists”.The need is being realized in the US for a more objective and scientific understanding of the causes of terrorism.

For the immediate future, the myth of terrorism being synonymous with Islamic fundamentalism prevails, and even academic evaluations of various countries and leaders is taking place on this basis. The initial fillip to Pakistan’s relations with the United States received from its counter-terrorist alliance with Washington has gradually worn off, and a negative change is in evidence.

The Report of the Council on Foreign Relations Asia Society entitled “New Priorities in South Asia: US Policies towards India, Pakistan and Afghanistan”released in November 2003 had this to say about relations with Pakistan: “Pakistan presents one of the most complex and difficult challenges facing US diplomacy. Its political instability, entrenched Islamist extremism, economic and social weaknesses, and dangerous hostility with India, have cast dark shadows over the nuclear armed nation. Even though Pakistan offers valuable help in rooting out the remnants of Al Qaeda, it has failed to prevent the use of its territory by Islamic terrorists as a base for armed attacks on Kashmir and Afghanistan”.

The perspective of the US on the Islamic world remains narrow, and is still influenced by conservative Christians who are hostile to Islam, and indirectly by Israel and India, whose perceptions are currently those of the religious extremists in control. The US readiness to transfer power to the local elites in Iraq and Afghanistan, and its recognition of the limits of military power may signal a return to traditional diplomacy, with enhanced role for the UN. Washington also shows signs of moving away from the current simplistic view of the Islamic world as a hostile monolith. Pakistan needs to cultivate “enlightened moderation”, both to stimulate domestic harmony and progress and to set an example for other Islamic countries.

Pakistan’s role and relationship with the US would gain through better handling of religious extremism, that is partly caused by economic weakness. Washington sets great store by the reduction of hostility between India and Pakistan, but its capacity to promote a rapprochement would depend in part on its credibility as an honest broker.

The relationship of the US with China would also have a bearing, since Washington would count more on India if it perceives China as a threat, while stable Sino-US relations would benefit Pakistan. In the ultimate analysis, there can be more predictability about the Sino-Pakistan relationship, while the relationship with the US would be shaped to a considerable extent by the superpower’s perceptions of the Islamic world, India, and China.

ONE thing you have to say about President George W. Bush: He’s has got a great sense of humour. “Freedom”, he said recently on return from the killing fields of Iraq, “is worth fighting for, dying for and standing for”!

However, the fact remains that the liberty of doing evil by invading other countries and killing innocent men, women and children, as Bush is doing, is not liberty. As the Roman poet Horace said long ago: “Dutce et decorum est pro patria mori” — it is sweet and proper to die for one’s country.

There is no greater curse for the human soul than the loss of personal freedom just as there is no greater curse than the loss of national independence. As someone said: “No one loves freedom more than those who had it and lost it. No one prizes it more than those who lost it and regained it”.

When Herodotus wrote that the Greeks were a “free people”, he meant that they were not slaves under foreign conquest or domination. By this definition, the North Koreans and Iranians are a free people. Afghans and Iraqis, on the other hand, are not a free people. Today they are slaves because they are under American military occupation and have lost their sovereignty.

It must be a dreadful feeling to get up in the morning and suddenly realize that you are a slave in your own country and no longer free. To be placed in a situation where your choice is limited to Liberty or Death, where you have to decide whether to collaborate and obey the occupying authority or risk everything and defy the enemy, must present a terrible dilemma.

It is a Sophies’ choice, horrible in its consequences either way. To add insult to injury, Bush is now calling for “a forward strategy of freedom” to promote democracy in the occupied countries. Adolf Hitler was more candid than Bush. He did not pretend he was a liberator. He enslaved Europe but he did not have the effrontery to call it a “strategy of Freedom” as Bush has done.

Contrary to what Bush said on November 6, there is no necessary connection between liberty and democratic rule. John Stuart Mill opened his classic “On Liberty” by noting that as countries became democratic, people tended to believe that, “too much importance had been attached to the limitation of power itself. That ... was a response against rulers whose interests were opposed to those of the people”. Once the people were themselves incharge caution was unnecessary. “The nation did not need to be protected against its own will”.

Alexander Lukashenko after being elected President of Belarus with an overwhelming majority in a free election in 1994, when asked about limiting his powers said: “there will be no dictatorship. I am of the people and I am going to be for the people”. The tendency for a democratic government to believe that it has absolute power can result in the centralization of authority, often by extra constitutional means and with grim results. Over the last several decades, elected governments claiming to represent the people have steadily encroached on the powers and rights of other elements in society.

Hitler’s rise to power was not an electoral fluke or a covert coup. The greatest terrorist of the 20th century climbed to power on a democratic ladder with disastrous consequences for his own country and the rest of the world. The people’s assemblies of ancient Greece had unlimited powers and were truly democratic because every male had the right to participate in the governance of the community. But the individual’s rights were neither sacred in theory nor protected in fact.

Greek democracy often meant the subjection of the individual to the authority of the community. In the fourth century B. C. in Athens, where Greek democracy is said to have found its truest expression, the people’s assembly — by democratic vote — put to death the greatest philosopher of the age because of his teaching. The execution of Socrates was democratic but it was, nonetheless, a great tragedy and an act of great injustice.

In recent times, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the elected prime minister of Pakistan, was toppled in a military coup, convicted of murder, not by a democratic vote but by a full bench of the Lahore High Court and sentenced to death. His appeal was dismissed by the Supreme Court by a majority decision of 4 to 3. The execution of Socrates was democratic. The hanging of Bhutto was undemocratic and a judicial murder. What difference does it make? The end result in both cases was the same.

“The advance of Freedom”, Bush said, “is the calling of our time. It is the calling of our country”. Freedom from what? One may ask. Freedom for the pike is death for the minnows. Freedom for an Oxford don is a very different thing from Freedom for a Sindhi hari. To offer political rights or safeguards against intervention by the state, beyond a certain minimum, to men who are half naked, illiterate, underfed and diseased, is to mock their condition; they need medical help or education — before they can understand, or make use of, an increase in their freedom.

First things come first: there are situations in which — to use a saying satirically attributed to the nihilists by Dostoevsky — boots are superior to Pushkin. Freedom in the modern world is first and foremost the freedom of the individual from arbitrary authority which has meant, from the brute force of the state. It implies certain basic human rights: Freedom of expression, of association, and of worship and rights of due process. This kind of liberty or freedom comes only after men’s more basic needs have been satisfied. It is in Lord Acton’s phrase, the delicate fruit of a mature civilization.

There is no necessary connection between democratic rule and good governance either. Governments produced by democratic elections, specially in Third World countries, are more often than not, inefficient, corrupt, shortsighted, irresponsible, dominated by special interests, unresponsive to the needs of the electorate and incapable of adopting policies demanded by the public. These qualities make such governments undesirable but they don’t make them undemocratic.

On the other hand, Hong Kong, a British colony, ruled by the British Crown through an appointed governor-general, had never held a democratic election, but its government epitomized constitutional liberalism, protecting its citizen’s basic rights and administering a fair system of judicial administration and bureaucracy. British rule in Hong Kong and even in India was no democracy (colonialism by very definition is undemocratic) but it was constitutional liberalism meaning there was rule of law, independence of judiciary, justice between man and man etc.

It took American democracy, the greatest democracy in the world, 86 years to abolish slavery, 144 years to enfranchise women and 189 years to assure the black people the vote. After a century and a half, American democracy produced the Great Depression. Democracy is not a rose garden. It is as fallible as human beings.

“My greatest complaint against democratic government”, Tocqueville wrote, “as organized in the United States is not, as many Europeans make out, its weakness, but rather its irresistible strength. What I find most repulsive in America is not the extreme freedom reigning there but the shortage of guarantees against tyranny... I know no country in which, speaking generally, there is less independence of mind and true freedom of discussion than in America”.

Tocqueville wrote with an uncanny feeling for the grand currents of history and with a wholesome sense of how much and how little we can deflect those currents. He alerted his own and later generations to the risks that would come with the promise of the New World. Like other classics of political thought, what Tocqueville wrote has a ring of prophecy.

Today the most powerful democracy in the world, upholder of liberty and rights of man, is detaining hundreds of suspected foot soldiers of the Taliban in a legal black hole at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay. Since January 2002, about 660 prisoners including children between the ages of 13 and 16 as well as elderly people are held there without being given prisoner - of - war status. At Camp Delta the cells measure 6x8 feet.

The purpose of holding the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay was and is to put them beyond the rule of law, beyond the protection of any courts, and at the mercy of the victors. The procedural rules expressly provide that statements made by a prisoner under physical and mental duress are admissible. Prisoners will be tried by military tribunals. They have no access to the writ of Habeas Corpus. The military will act as interrogators, prosecutors, defence counsel, judges and when death sentences are imposed, as executioners. Trial will be held in secret. None of the basic guarantees for a fair trial need be observed. The jurisdiction of US courts is excluded.

As matters stand at present, the US courts would refuse to hear a prisoner who produces credible medical evidence that he has been and is being tortured. They would refuse to hear prisoners who assert that they were not combatants at all. They would refuse to hear prisoners who assert that they were simply soldiers in the Taliban army and know nothing about Al Qaeda. They would refuse to examine any complaint of any individuals.

The blanket presidential order deprives them all of any rights whatever. “As a lawyer brought up to admire the ideals of Americans democracy and justice”, observed Lord Steyn Lord of Appeal in Ordinary, 1 of 12 judges who sits on Britain’s Highest Court, “I would have to say that I regard this as a monstrous failure of Justice”.

“Oh liberty! What crimes are committed in thy name”?