ISLAMABAD, March 16: Top PPP leader Shah Mehmood Qureshi on Tuesday said the government could be allowed to continue for five years on the basis of quid pro quo. He was speaking at a seminar on "Rule of law:
Rhetoric or reality?" organized by the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) here.
Elaborating, Mr Qureshi said the quid pro quo was that the government arrived at a consensus with the opposition on some things "essential for democracy" such as an independent election commission and judiciary etc.
He said his party recognised Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali as prime minister but it wanted him to operate in accordance with the principles of parliamentary democracy. In fact, the prime minister is working in such a manner as to render the parliament subservient to the armed forces, he charged.
The institute had invited four MNAs one each from the Muslim League-Q, MMA, MQM and Pakistan People's Party to attend the seminar, but only Shah Mahmood Qureshi and Dr Farooq Sattar could turn up. However, their speeches reeked of a rhetoric of their kind.
Starting the debate, Mr Qureshi tried to prove that there was no rule of law in the country. He supported his assertion by stating that all the four major criteria for such a state of affairs were missing.
These included equality in the eye of the law, transparency in government's functioning, an independent election commission and an independent judiciary. These are the prerequisites to investor confidence without which there could be no economic growth, he emphasized.
He was particularly critical of the role of the Election Commission of Pakistan which, he said, had gone along with the General Pervez Musharraf's scheme of obtaining legitimacy through unconstitutional devices such as referendum. Similarly, the judiciary had donned the role of constitution-maker by allowing the military regime to amend the constitution, though it had no such authority, he added.
The situation now is that all important decisions are being taken by a small coterie outside the parliament, the PPP leader remarked. Answering questions from the audience, he said the political parties had learned their lessons from the past when they remained at logger heads in disregard of implications for democracy.
A social activist remarked that there was no consistency in the words and actions of political leaders. In this connection, he recalled that on the one hand they condemned the Musharraf regime, on the other they participated in the elections organised under the same unconstitutional legal framework. Mr Qureshi justified this policy on the basis of pragmatism.
Dr Farooq Sattar, a leader of MQM, avoided categorically stating whether the rule of law was a reality or mere rhetoric in Pakistan. But he too implied that there was indeed no rule of law in Pakistan. He qualified his assertion by a prolonged sally into the past to show that the situation was implicit in all the constitutional experiments made in Pakistan since its inception.
His oratory was, however, marked by inconsistencies. On one occasion, he criticised the repeated recourse by the military to direct rule. But then he said there was little difference between the behaviour of the advocates of parliamentary democracy and the military regimes.
