Republican double-speak

The books used to talk about how the American Republican party was really two parties. The first of them was very decent and sometimes very grand indeed, and could answer truthfully to the term compassionate conservative.

It was the party of Theodore Roosevelt and Nelson Rockefeller. The second party was decent too, in its way, but it was decidedly not so grand as the first. It was the party of people like Dwight Eisenhower and, stretching a point, Richard Nixon.

Identifiable traces of these two mid-20th century parties, particularly the latter, still live on in George Bush's Republican party of 2004. But they survive there on sufferance, in a transformed party. Even so, you could argue that the Republicans of today are still based on a kind of alliance, though the new one bears no relation to the old.

The first arm, which has all of the power and most of the dynamism, is the religious conservative activist party that gathered in Madison Square Garden recently to acclaim Bush, now himself the de facto leader of the religious right. The second, still necessary to the first for purely electoral reasons, consists of people who vote Republican in the belief that the party is as nice as it portrays itself, when in fact it is no such thing.

One needs to beware of applying the political mores of one culture to those of another. Even so, there was no mistaking the sheer aggressiveness of the Republicans. This quality showed above all in the treatment reserved for John Kerry, who was subjected to a four-day stream of orchestrated personal insults that makes British politics appear truly gentlemanly by comparison.

Nothing that happens in a convention hall happens without the party managers' approval. Every placard they wave has been handed out by party officials a few minutes before. So the sudden outbreak of delegates wearing sticking plasters with Purple Hearts on them - implying that Kerry exaggerated his Vietnam wounds in order to win his medals - could hardly have been an unofficial move either, and stands in marked contrast to earlier denials by the Bush campaign that it was promoting the apparently "non-partisan" anti-Kerry moves by rightwing Vietnam veterans.

Of course, it was not an unofficial move at all. What the delegates expressed with their nasty stickers, the party's leaders actually said, just as nastily, from the platform. Speech after speech besmirched Kerry's military record - a record which he had placed at the centre of his own campaign in an explicit bid for electoral credibility both as a man and as a potential president - none more brutally than the Georgia Democratic senator Zell Miller, who cast Kerry as "wrong, weak and wobbly" and as a man with a "yes-no-maybe" approach to the war on terrorism.

In a truly revealing turn of events, after years in which rightwing America has endlessly celebrated the unquiet Vietnam veterans as a betrayed generation of real male patriots, mainstream Republican demonology has now cast Kerry as a man whose preoccupation with his own exploits in Vietnam make him fundamentally unreliable both as man and potential leader.

The fact that rightwing America can so shamelessly taunt Kerry in this way, led by a non-combatant president who refuses to condemn the negative campaign and by a vice-president who fanned the flames in his own speech ("I had other priorities" is how Cheney icily describes his own Vietnam years) is a reminder that what is crucially important to Republicans is not, as they like to say, the tradition of armed service but, in reality, their claim to exclusive ownership of the politics of US defence, security and war.

Throughout last week, it goes almost without saying, there was not a single critical reference to the American military, not even in relation to Abu Ghraib. Bush himself probably saw no element of irony in his closing encomium of "our military which finds a way, or makes one".

Such self-confidence reminds us how much more vicious American politics since 9/11 would have been if Al Gore had been in the White House when the hijacked planes were flown into the World Trade Centre. Would the Republicans have rallied behind Gore as the Democrats rallied behind Bush that day? Not a chance.

Within days they would have begun to blame Bill Clinton for the attack on America. Some of them, indeed, do so anyway. Browsing through a New York Barnes and Noble bookstore the other day I encountered titles like Losing Bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror, Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How Bill Clinton compromised American's National Security or Intelligence Failure: How Clinton's National Security Policy Set the Stage for 9/11.

For such people, the mere act of imagining John Kerry as their duly elected "commander-in-chief" is offensive. Miller and others have said as much. Cheney, in the speech of great ruthlessness, went further than most. And again, all this provides a glimpse of the vengeful and vindictive way that a defeated Republican party might be tempted to treat a President Kerry. The Republican party today is not at ease in any settlement other than one whose terms it has dictated. You can already sense the impeachment reflex beginning to take on life.

In some ways it is as though the modern Republican party has become the political expression of the "misplaced power" of the military-industrial complex against which Eisenhower famously warned as he left the White House in 1961. In any other political culture, you would characterize the Republicans as a militarist party, and in that context it would be perverse not to reflect upon whether this central development in American life did not have far more sinister implications, not least when so many references to the war on terror last week have been accompanied by testosterone-fuelled chants of "U-S-A, U-S-A".

Yet the Republican party which Bush leads should really be seen as the party that tries to unite the military-industrial and religious imperatives in American life. If Bush was careful during the convention not to take the attacks on Kerry too far, he was much less restrained in his meticulous willingness to tick each of the boxes that matter to the religious party he now leads.

But it was not merely his comments about the unborn child and gay marriage that marked this key role. Time and again, Bush also deployed his well-established "double-coding" technique, dotting his speech with remarks which may not sound to the uninitiated as though they have a Christian conservative meaning, but which initiates will easily read differently.

"We must win this culture war," the Republican senator Sam Brownback told a private Family, Faith and Freedom rally in New York last week. For many in Bush's party, this is now the central task of a second term. "We ask that you continue to provide strength to President Bush and the first family," intoned the blessing with which the final convention evening began. "Guide, protect, and grant wisdom to him as he leads America and the world against the forces of evil ... And father, we pray your will is accomplished in this convention and throughout this great country."

Much of what was said in Madison Square Garden this week was a masterpiece of Orwellian double-speak. A few things, on the other hand, meant exactly what they said.

-Dawn/The Guardian News Service

The cabinet and the troika

The central feature of a parliamentary government is the collective responsibility of the cabinet to the parliament. The same principle is stated in the Constitution of Pakistan, despite its impaired parliamentary character.

To fulfil this responsibility, the size of the cabinet has to be small and its members have to think and act alike. The cabinet now in the making meets neither of the two criteria. Being large and heterogeneous, power is bound to flow out of it to rest elsewhere. That was the fate of Zafarullah Jamali's cabinet, as of the most cabinets before him. It could be worse for this one because it is bigger.

The larger-than-ever cabinet of Shaukat Aziz and the multiple party creeds (or no creed at all) and individual ambitions it represents is sure to militate against the principle of collective responsibility more than it did in the past.

The number of ministers and ministers of state (they too, under the Constitution, are covered by the principle of collective responsibility though they are not members of the cabinet) seems to be heading towards 60. Quite understandably, neither can the power of the government be so thinly spread nor can state secrets shared with so large a number especially when their loyalties are uncertain and shifting.

In such a situation, power and responsibility are bound to pass into the hands of a smaller and more cohesive group, variedly called kitchen cabinet or caucus, junta or establishment. The term currently gaining currency is troika comprising the president, the prime minister and the head of the Muslim League, which is a major partner in the ruling coalition.

There is yet another complicating factor. The president, in our parliamentary scheme, is not just the constitutional head of state, he has substantial powers. Above all, he can dissolve the National Assembly. At present, he also sits at the head of the army but even when he does not, the armed forces will remain involved in the political power structure through the National Security Council over which he presides. The system thus is now a mix of the parliamentary, presidential and martial.

In the troika, the president thus will have more power than the other two members put together. The weakest would be the Muslim League president for he represents not the whole coalition but only one of its components which by itself cannot sustain the government. The importance of the present incumbent of this office, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, is more personal than institutional. The ministers, thus, would owe allegiance and feel responsible more to the troika - or by whatever other name the big three may come to be known - than to parliament.

The National Assembly, with the cabinet not feeling responsible to it, will be reduced to a forum for debate in which the ministers may not even bother to participate. The Senate, in any case, has a limited role in the making of laws, and even lesser say in executive affairs. It can neither vote on money bills nor initiate a no-confidence motion against the government.

Most to lose, and thus most aggrieved, by the power deserting the cabinet and the parliament are the smaller provinces for they have no representation nor influence in the informal bodies where it goes to rest. Put to jeopardy, then is not just the parliamentary system but the federation itself. The responsibility for it, ironically, falls on the very political elements who outwardly work to strengthen both the parliament and the federation. Obviously, their personal and group interests are better served by collaborating with the less representative but more assertive forces outside the parliament.

If Shaukat Aziz is able to persuade the president and Chaudhry Shujaat to amend the Constitution to bring the Senate of Pakistan in line with the Senate of the United States, he would be rendering a great service to both democracy and the federation. The Senate would then exercise a check on the executive through its committees and thus give weightage to the smaller provinces in decision making. The appointments of the secretaries, judges, ambassadors and police chiefs by the president / prime minister, for instance, would then be subject to the scrutiny and approval of the appropriate committee of the Senate.

The charge of bogus voting in the by-polls, especially in Thar, and the refusal of the speaker to bring Javed Hashmi, the other contender for the post of the prime minister, to the house cast a shadow on Shaukat Aziz's political career before it had begun. He would have been surely elected member of the National Assembly, and later its leader, without the exertions of his obsequious friends in politics and officialdom.

They have deprived him of a neutral and promising debut in politics which indeed he deserved drawing on his reputation as a banker and performance as finance minister. The size and composition of the cabinet have only darkened the shadows and aroused new suspicions.

At present, both the politics and administration of the country are in a state of flux or, as President Musharraf put it, in turmoil. The political institutions will not find their bearing nor truly represent the will of the people till the next elections are held without disqualifications imposed by the generals or interference by the officials or intimidation by the extremists of race or religion.

Until that happens, administrative skill would help in meeting the basic needs of the common man and relieving him of his worries which political manoeuvres, spread over more than a decade, have only exacerbated.

The conflicts and deprivations at the basic level of society are too deep-rooted and widespread to admit of instant or superficial remedies. Discretionary funds and a role in the administration of the district and the police may placate the members of the national and provincial assemblies but would not help, and rather harm, the people.

Economic planning at the top and the rule of law at the bottom have completely broken down. Grants for individuals and ad hoc packages for the selected areas and cities have replaced planned economic spending for the benefit of the community as a whole. The ordinary people can obtain protection and justice only through influential or paid intermediaries, against harassment by the police and courts they have no accessible resort or easy remedy.

The inability of the new set-up with the "troika" planted at its top to give to the people the rights and the respect they deserve may be understandable but not its failure to reinstate economic planning at the centre and a neutral administration afield. Safety and welfare should come to the people as a matter of right from the institutions of the state and not as largesse from favoured individuals.

Fighting a weak system: Drawbacks of devolution - II

While the district governments have conveniently demonized the provincial governments, and the central governments have also pointed them out as the Achilles' heel of devolution, the reverse is perhaps the real issue, and it is the district governments which challenge the constitutional framework of federalism.

Federalism envisages a horizontal sharing of power while devolution is a vertical transfer of power. Under the Constitution, local government is an aspect of provincial governments. The concept of transferring power to the districts should have ethically come from the federating units. Legislations should have been designed by the provincial governments. However, it came from the central government thus enhancing the suspicions of provincial governments of not only being bypassed, but of the creation of a parallel system of government.

Constitutionally, district government adds yet another implementing agency to the already controversial concurrent list. The 1973 Constitution provides for a federal structure with one centre and four provincial governments. While some subjects are mentioned as an exclusive mandate of the federal government, a large list of subjects called the concurrent list shows the areas to be shared by the federal and provincial governments. Anything outside this list is the exclusive domain of the provincial government.

The concurrent list has been a serious issue between the federal government and the provinces. The latter have stated time and again that the concurrent list should be done away with, giving the provinces clear powers over various departments and exclusive administrative jurisdictions. However, before this could be done, the district governments emerged to share power with the federal and provincial governments. Although under the Constitution the district governments are under the provincial governments, they are in practice, parallel governments.

A command structure has to be an exclusive one. You cannot have officers from grade 17 to grade 20 being shared by two executives, one from the provincial and the other the district governments. One authority transfers them, another posts them, a third writes their annual confidential reports. The structure dualizes power, authority and management creating parallelism that results in administrative chaos.

The district nazims/administrators are expected to deliver but the powers of postings of key officers including the district coordination officer (DCO) and the district police officer (DPO) continue to be the prerogative of the provincial governments. The ministers continue to exercise their vertical powers as though devolution never happened. The revenue ministers continue to engage in petty transfers of small revenue officials. Ministers also exercise traditional powers of all postings and transfers in their own districts, thereby creating serious tensions in the district.

In Khairpur for instance, all DPOS, DCOs, EDOs (executive district officer) are posted by the minister from Khairpur in the Sindh government. At least two of my important years in local government have been spent fighting against the officers that provincial governments sent, in this case, always with intention of political colonization of the district. One DPO kept protecting criminals and lodging criminal cases against me and my team of supporters. And one DCO kept blocking my development funds.

The district government has to make do with them and has no administrative or disciplinary control over these officers. Trapped between the devil and the deep blue see, the officials are confused, their loyalties to the service becomes transposed into loyalties to this or that government, and they become engaged in political divisions rather than governance

Consider also the police force. No one knows whether the Police Order, 2002, is implemented or not. Theoretically it is, but the National Reconstruction Bureau (NRB) says that it will be enforced in October. Initially the order bypassed the provincial government even in the posting of DPOs, making the IG the exclusive appointing authority.

This issue was the bone of contention between the provinces and the central government and has only recently been settled. Under the Order, the district nazim is responsible for all functions of the Order except investigation. Yet the DPO seems to be also answerable to the provincial home department, to his DIG, then AIG, then the IG.

It is not clear as to what administrative authority the nazim has over the police, or why a police officer should heed the area nazim. The increasing trend of custodial violence testifies to the reaction of the police department to the present governance system regulating it. There also seems to be little enforcement in containing public nuisances like encroachments, traffic violations, price fixations etc, because the police is not listening to anyone.

A no-confidence motion against elected representatives is possible only if the nazim is of the opposition party. Otherwise he is protected and placed outside the law. A taluka nazim of my district had 12 out of 14 members against him but the DPO appointed by the minister from Khairpur cordoned off the whole city and the members had to sit on the road and have a no confidence against him. This no-confidence motion was dismissed by the courts because it did not follow procedures as it was on the roads. Similarly, accountability too has become subjective to the same local government and provincial government tussle.

Local accountability mechanisms are non-existent. When there is duplicity, no one is really watching. The elected representatives also seem to be not accountable to any one, least of all to the councillors who feel completely betrayed by the system. Unfortunately, all the institutions which would like to protect the system either have no political mandate or are weakened by choice. The NRB has been reduced to a report-writing institution. This team of largely technical members has completely distanced itself from the political problems of the districts.

Khairpur, until the late fifties enjoyed the status of an independent state, with its own industries and heavily subsidized education system. It had a prime minister, a high court, a state hakim and several other institutions. Today, Khairpur, a district of 16,000 sq. km, and with a population of nearly 1.8 million, is a medium sized, medium backward district. There are eight talukas, and 76 union councils in the district. The district has a radio station, a university, several impressive high schools from the time of the state. It is agriculturally rich but has also vast resources of oil and gas in its eastern desert region of Nara.

Under the law, the district nazim has been made personally responsible for all that goes on in the district. Along with a large number of responsibilities, the district nazim also has a large range of powers, administrative and executive. However, in practice, the provincial government administers all the above departments although we fund them through fiscal transfers by the provincial government. We are, therefore, administering them by proxy, by partial and selective powers diffused through financial transfers.

Devolution is now moving into a vicious cycle. No one seems to care where the system is at, time frames have been sidetracked, and the rules of business have been shoved in a dusty rack somewhere. Earlier notifications glorifying the powers of district nazims are being ignored, ordinances are being overlooked, the higher-ups are contradicting their own statements, their own rules. Officers slip in and out of the districts with no knowledge of the district governments, transfers and postings are arbitrary, leaving us isolated, and unable to get a grip on the administration.

Khairpur, like other districts in upper Sindh, is increasingly becoming a self-help area, with weakening authorities of the regulatory and line departments. Feudals especially those protected by the government, grab land, with the help of revenue departments. Teachers still remain absent, doctors still do not come for duty, the police still acts as a mercenary force, the tapedar still continues to forge mutations. In fact, the nazim, in the absence of enforcement powers can do little to check malpractice.

Little governments continue to be managed by mafias that rob the state of its resources of land, water, tax, security etc. The criminal justice system, despite the Asian Development Bank's massive funding, still suffers because of a mercenary police and lower judiciary. Private justice is increasing with dangerous repercussions for society.

Weak governments open up areas to all kinds of non-state actors, and allow client-patron partnerships to take up alternative institutional forms. Sindh's rural political representation comprises a largely feudal elite with little support from its masses. This elite was handpicked by the military establishment for its loyalty to the military, and therefore, this elite depends entirely on the state to serve its private interest.

With a drought raging through the land, agricultural water running short, poverty galloping and no institutional support coming from the state, if the present system of shared dual governance continues, and the alienation of people from the central government grows, upper Sindh will be reduced to a warlord society.

The only way out of the governance impasse is to restore democracy in a full and fair form, bring back integrity and authority to the parliaments and put the military back in the barracks. All solutions coming through democratic parliaments will be legitimate and will reflect the sociopolitical realities of the country. The political institutions have to be freed for them to move forward and construct structures of governance that deliver.

Concluded

The writer is the Zila Nazim, Khairpur.