Who rules & to what end?

IN the ruling dispensation under President Musharraf, the horizontal line of authority at the federal level is represented by the executive wing of the state. In the vertical line of authority, the centre dominates the provinces in every meaningful sense. How does one move towards a participatory model of democracy in this situation? Understanding and reforming the semi-presidential system of authority in Pakistan, as it currently operates within a formal and symbolic parliamentary framework, is the key to a democratic future.

The widely held view is that the president-in-uniform has concentrated all powers in his own hands. Next to him, Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz plays a merely formal and ceremonial role mainly to uphold the fiction that there is a parliamentary form of government in place. The prime minister leads the largest cabinet in Pakistan’s history. Every military government in the past took pride in the claim that it ruled with a cabinet much smaller than under its civilian predecessors. The difference lay in the need to shower patronage in the form of huge perquisites for which the nation is squeezed. The present cabinet symbolizes patronage politics par excellence and thus belies all claims to the contrary.

Like the prime minister, but also including him, the cabinet represents a political executive which is devoid of executive powers. It neither initiates policy, nor debates it with a view to formulate or finalize it, nor indeed does it implement it in a substantive sense. Again, like the prime minister, the cabinet actually provides a civilian facade to the ruling setup. It represents the president, the party-in-coalition and the clientele structure back in the electoral constituency rather than the public at large.

But then, who takes the decisions? Parallel to the formal structure of government, there is a more substantive but less formalized line of authority. It starts, again, with the president and includes the corps commanders as policymakers on top and the civil bureaucracy for implementation of policy. Underneath an ‘elected’ system, an administrative state holds the initiative in major fields of public policy. This state is buttressed by the invisible government inasmuch as intelligence agencies play a political role for the government.

Apart from the formal executive represented by the cabinet, we have the parliament comprising the Senate and the National Assembly. The parliament in Pakistan is a subordinate body as far as its relations with the executive are concerned. It functions as a forum for taking the steam out of the opposition, comprising ARD parties, MMA parties, ethno-nationalist parties such as PNP, BNM, MQM, and ANP as well as certain miniscule parties.

The supreme law-making body of Pakistan does not make laws. The level of legislative activity on the floor of the parliament is abysmally low. It deals with laws which are often initiated from outside the legislature in the form of presidential ordinances. The committee work is endless and fruitless as far as its input in policy formulation is concerned. The work of the Kashmir committee and the Balochistan committee is a case in point.

With the real executive being in control of things from behind the scene, and the legislature being engaged in procedural work carrying little substance, perhaps the judiciary could provide a silver lining under the present circumstances. On the contrary, the judiciary has come a long way from its heyday in the 1990s when judicial activism had challenged the Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif governments.

The transition from an oath under the Constitution to an oath under a military dispensation after the 1999 coup dealt a severe blow to the credibility of judges belonging to the Supreme Court of Pakistan and High Courts of Balochistan, the NWFP, Sindh and Punjab. Also, the grossly controversial elections held under retired judges of higher courts operating as chief election commissioners, including the 2002 elections and the 2005 local bodies elections, have cost the judiciary in the public eye.

At the other end, the centre-province relations are far from satisfactory. The Constitution has only the federal and concurrent legislative lists. For three decades, politicians have been demanding a provincial list but to no avail. Constitutionally, Pakistan is a highly over-centralized state. Financially, the country fares no better. Around 90 per cent of the national revenue is raised by the centre, eight to nine per cent by the four provinces and less than one per cent by local governments.

This is despite the much-trumpeted devolution. Governments in Quetta, Karachi, Peshawar and Lahore operate on the basis of resources transferred by the centre. Centre-province relations are built around tension, not around a constant process of reaching agreements with the federating units of Pakistan.

If finance belongs ultimately to the centre, so does bureaucracy. Pakistan has its superior services centralized in all aspects ranging from recruitment, training, posting and transfer to promotion. One may have an MMA government in Peshawar, but it is unable to go very far in pursuit of its agenda. The central bureaucracy sees to it that all financial and administrative matters are dealt with in a manner that does not falter away from the charted path of the centre’s preferred policy and profile. The same applies to Quetta and Karachi where coalition partners, the MMA and MQM, are administratively controlled.

While policy remains with Islamabad, patronage characterizes the provincial governments. The Musharraf government, like its military predecessors, co-opted politicians into the system through elections. The 2002 elections staged a generational transition within political families. The young leadership is being ‘groomed’ to accept the realities of power characterized by the superordinate role of the army.

What do politicians get in return? After all, they render themselves liable to accusations of being disloyal to their political parties, being turncoats, and, worse, being renegades to the noble cause of democracy. Their gain is the power of patronage. Access to office in the government or belonging to the treasury benches in general ensures their preferential treatment in terms of timely disbursement of development funds in their constituencies. They use their privileges to consolidate their hold over their constituencies.

Patronage is the name of the game in the provinces, be it PML-Q, MQM, MMA or any other party or alliance of parties in office. By choosing to operate under the Musharraf system, they fulfill the need to keep a majority-based dispensation in power on the floor of the assemblies. The provincial politicians have been at liberty to operate according to their whims or interest-based pursuits. Some of them are known for one or more of a thousand ways of getting funds or access to privileges.

The patterns of leadership are conspicuous by their absence. The nation has no political leader out in the field. The government would not like a rival pattern of leadership to emerge on the political scene. President Musharraf has shown inclination to allow the two political parties, PML-N and PPP, to be part of his system, but not their leaders.

The two parties have not countenanced the idea of joining the system without getting back their leaders from exile. On the other hand, MQM has accepted the idea of playing on the turf laid out for the political community, without ensuring the safe return of its leader to Pakistan. The difference is that both Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif have higher stakes in the system in the form of possible ascendancy to the office of chief executive.

The prevalent system has been able to withstand pressures of public opinion, civil society, media, political leadership and the electorate that can possibly vote against the establishment given free and fair elections, as well as international pressure to move forward in democratic terms. Whether political leaders of various shades will be able to make a difference in this regard depends on their potential to ensure fair elections in 2007.

Fight the good fight

THE pagan spring celebration of birth and fertility, transformed nowadays into the gluttonous consumption of Easter eggs, has for most people supplanted the three most important days of the Christian calendar. The surviving faithful, particularly the newly converted who were attracted in the first place by the security offered by faith, feel undermined by the disregard of what to them is most important, and not just at Easter. For some Christians, the response is a retreat to a militant orthodoxy. They are not alone. Most world religions now support a radical or fundamentalist wing that reflects not a pre-determined instinct for intolerance so much as a fearful reaction to the 21st century, to cultural globalisation and commercial imperialism backed by military strength. To tolerate the intolerant, to accommodate the unbending, is the greatest challenge facing the defenders of a secular society, one that rejects a role for religion in the state.

Fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon, where sacred texts are imbued with a single interpretation. Every faith is vulnerable, every continent is affected. The most extreme example of Christian fundamentalism brought violence to the United States almost a decade before 9/11. Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber who killed 168 people in 1995, was acting in revenge for the federal authorities’ attack on the Waco Branch Davidian sect two years earlier. The capacity of well-funded Christian fundamentalist movements to capture the politics of the American right is increasingly well documented. There are reports that these same movements are paying close attention to developments in Britain where Archbishop Rowan Williams sits uncomfortably between the two wings of the Anglican communion. Fundamentalism of every faith is angry, scared and often nationalistic. It is also confident that it possesses a unique truth, as the chief rabbi discovered when he suggested that in a pluralist world each religion should see its truth as partial and individual. Fundamentalism’s strength as an opponent is the certainty of its convictions.

The defenders of the secular state, believers and non-believers, can only hope to disarm it by finding a language that allows for doubt without compromising its own familiar principles — its faith in a rationally ordered society, a respect for science, for evidence-based knowledge, for non-religious education, and tolerance of religion supported by laws protecting individual rights. Within this general context, there are specific battles to fight, for example against the teaching of creationism, the extension (and the maintenance) of faith schools and the defence of free speech.

Religious liberals support the values of the modern secular state. They oppose racism and homophobia, they advocate the separation of church and state, they promote tolerance. This is why the current tension in the Anglican church should matter to everyone. If Rowan Williams were to decide that the Anglican Communion could only be saved by a lurch to conservatism, liberal secularism would be one of the losers. It may be that only two million regularly go to church, but three-quarters of Britons still regard themselves as Christian. The fight for women bishops and gay clergy is part of the wider fight for equality and tolerance throughout society. Religious liberals and defenders of the secular are fighting on the same side. In these pages, the vicar of Putney, Giles Fraser, called for liberals to rediscover their fight. So too must the defenders of secularism.

— The Guardian

Charioting the course of hate

AN intelligence report says that L.K. Advani’s ‘rath yatra’ in 1990 caused the largest number of killings after the partition riots in 1947. Yet, he has the audacity to say before embarking on another ‘yatra’ that the last one was peaceful. BJP chief Rajnath Singh, a new convert to ‘yatras’, wants to prove that his brand of Hindutva is more virulent than Advani’s.

Such clamorous street rallies have a disturbing effect on the public. They are injurious to the health of a country which claims to be a true democracy. What happened at Aligarh may not be the direct result of rallies. But their preparation has fouled the atmosphere. Extremist Muslims are also joining the fray and making them take on the lax administration.

Whether Advani will damage India’s plural society more than Rajnath Singh is difficult to predict at present. Both are determined to widen the chasm found between Hindus and Muslims in urban India and deepen the hatred that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh ‘parivar’ has spread in BJP-ruled states like Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan with the set programme of destroying every bit of commonality. The Rajasthan government has gone a step further and armed itself with an anti-conversion law to forcibly sideline the small minority of Christians from the mainstream.

I am told that at one stage Atal Behari Vajpayee was not happy over reviving ‘yatras’, probably realizing that they have served their “purpose”. Advani even made Vajpayee’s scepticism public. But then Vajpayee is ‘atal’ (firm) only in name. He changes his mind when he finds the RSS and its coterie in the BJP are opposed to his thinking. It is widely known that he wanted to remove Narendra Modi after what he, as chief minister, did to Gujarat. Vajpayee dropped the idea when the RSS told him not to disturb Modi. Instead, Vajpayee attacked the Islamic countries at his next stop in Goa.

That Vajpayee has blessed Advani and Rajnath Singh does not mean that ‘yatras’ have come to acquire better credentials. It only confirms that Vajpayee is a chip off the old block. He or, for that matter, his party has given yet more proof, if it is needed, that they are bent upon destroying the secular ethos of India. Only in whipping up sentiments against Muslims does the BJP see its future in elections. It feels it has a chance in the country if it can divide it on religious lines as the pre-partition Muslim League did.

The country has withstood attacks on its secular ethos in the past. It will do so again. What disappoints me is that at a time when India requires most attention to grapple with the ill-effects of development at the cost of social justice, the BJP is resurrecting the Frankenstein of communalism. It does not mind if the country goes to pieces in the process.

The BJP should realize that it is already losing its base. Advani and Rajnath Singh cannot retrieve a party which wants to take India back to the Middle Ages. When it came to power at the centre, it was not because people returned the party in an election but because some regional secular parties jettisoned their ideology to join the BJP government for the loaves of office.

The situation has changed now. State leaders like Mulayam Singh in UP and Chandrababu Naidu in Andhra Pradesh believe that they can capture power at New Delhi by amalgamating with other regional leaders. The BJP is ruled out on yet another count: the crucial Left will back only those regional parties which have no truck with the BJP. The next parliament may be dominated by regional parties, some of which have seen the BJP in its true colours.

As for ‘yatras’, the response has been poor because the average Hindu is not taken in by the propaganda that the minorities will swamp him. The BJP has played the ‘mandir’ card too often, much to the exasperation of the people. In the last general election, what hit the party was the countryside’s abhorrence of changes in the fields of education, culture and information. The worst was the distortion of history.

The BJP does not realize how deep the roots of pluralism in the country are. The latest book, Blood Brothers, by M.J. Akbar, an eminent journalist and author, has pointed this out. His is a saga of an Indian Muslim family, a story of three generations. He brings out boldly and objectively the innate strength of the subcontinent’s common heritage. It is not one culture, not one language but a myriad cultures and languages. Their accommodative living has made India what it is — open, tolerant and cohesive. Akbar’s span is wide. He explores Islam and Hinduism which mould lives in India and impress their image on the history of the times. The book deals with religion as a living element in today’s culture, not as a museum piece.

Akbar’s book tells us how Hindus and Muslims believe in one Creator and that the author’s grandfather “had not travelled too far when he was converted” from Hinduism to Islam. Both religions have so much in common. “The supreme God of the Vedas is Brahma. Brahma has no form; Allah also has no form. The Hindu philosophy of ‘mimansa’ says that idols are only a means to assist the mind towards Brahma. The Hindu seeks release from life in nirvana, I seek assimilation in Allah. Both sufi and ‘sanyasin’ reach God through meditation. The Hindu’s ‘kravana’ is my ‘sama’, we both listen; his ‘manana’ is my ‘muraqaba’, we both obey; his ‘nididhyanasana’ is my ‘tawajjuh’, we both contemplate. The ‘buddhi’ of the Brahmin is my ‘ilm’; we both learn; his ‘jnana’ is my ‘marafat’, we both seek emancipation through knowledge. What you call ‘maya’ (illusion), I call ‘alam-i-khyal’, the world of fancy”. Akbar underlines the spirit of tolerance that has woven Hindus and Muslims into a mosaic that mirrors different thoughts while keeping it one.

Take a small passage from his book: “Dinner was placed before the guests; biryani for Muslims and dishfuls of savouries for the Hindus purchased from a Hindu sweetmeat shop. It was the best available...” Akbar does not harangue or lecture to make the point about the sense of accommodation. He quietly tells us how solicitous the Muslims were about the Hindus’ belief in caste. The former purchases “savouries for the Hindus” from a Hindu sweetmeat shop. An era of sensitivity, the book traces from times immemorial.

Can the Advanis and Rajnath Singhs ever imbibe that spirit? If they do not and continue to chip away at the country’s institutions like pluralism they would be responsible for the harm done to society. They should understand that there can be no democracy without secularism.

The writer is a leading columnist based in New Delhi.