LAST Sunday we discussed Islamisation, the present government’s enlistment in the war against terrorism and the related drive against the Taliban, relations with India, domestic terrorism, and provincial autonomy as issues that will figure prominently in the election next year. Let us now turn to a few other issues.

All contenders will claim to cherish democracy not only as an ideal but as an imperative of political stability and national integrity. The opposition parties will demand its “restoration.” The ruling party, PML-Q, will claim that democracy is functioning well in this country: elections have been held, assemblies are in place, they debate and pass legislation, the press is free, organs of civil society are free to do their work, and governments remain open to scrutiny and criticism.

The opposition parties will reject these claims. They will allege that under the present regime elections were blatantly rigged, parliament was ignored on issues of high policy, presidential ordinances often replaced ordinary legislation, rules of business were set aside, and measures rushed through, to avoid debate; ministers did not appear to answer questions, and many of the ruling party’s own members deserted the House, forcing adjournment for lack of quorum.

They will further allege that the president usurped the prime minister’s powers and functions, decided policy issues in consultation with the generals, making it a military regime and the civilian apparatus a mere facade. Above all, he has seized the authority to dissolve the National Assembly and, thus, dismiss the prime minister if he has begun to have a mind of his own. This state of affairs, they will say, is not real democracy.

It seems to me that the case on each side is contaminated with a certain amount of exaggeration. The first thing a neutral observer may point out is that, except for the president’s authority to dissolve the National Assembly and his army connections, the way democracy is functioning now is the way it has functioned in the past. All elections, except one, were rigged, more or less; presidential ordinances abounded then as much as now; rules of business were evaded and even constitutional amendments passed within the space of a few hours (in some instances within minutes). Attendance in the House was thin, and the prime minister’s presence on the floor was infrequent enough to make news when it did happen. Democracy has had a faltering passage in this country because its attendant values, attitudes, and operational modes are not yet planted in our political culture deeply enough. We are still in the process of cultivating them. We still have some distance to go in overcoming the inclination to arbitrariness. We must give ourselves time to learn to be at home with the ways of democracy. I am for rejecting, firmly and unreservedly, the nonsense that democracy does not suit our “genius.”

We may now ask how the government’s and the opposition’s reasoning, described above, will be received by the voters. I think we have reached the point in political awareness where the people will object to public officials coming in to force them to vote one way or another or to break and stuff the ballot boxes. But in the absence of a truly charismatic leader and momentous issues, they will still answer the calls of caste, clan, and tribal connections, which is the case in many other democracies also. They will want their representatives to bring provincial and federal funds for schools, roads, clinics and hospitals, jobs, and various other amenities to their areas. I am not sure how it works in European democracies, but I do know that all of this forms part of the voter’s expectation in America.

The well educated voters may deplore resort to presidential ordinances, evasion of the rules of business in parliament, absence of ministers from the floor to answer questions, and things of that order, I doubt that the ordinary voter will be concerned about them. But we can be certain that he/she will be concerned with electoral rigging by government agencies and officials. Rigging by the present regime will be an issue more than that done by its predecessors.

The next major issue in the election is likely to be that of the military’s involvement in governance. All political parties, with the partial exception of the PML-Q, will condemn it, call it a negation of democracy, and indeed equate it with lawlessness. A European statesman once said that war was too important a business to be left to the generals. That used to be the rule not only in democracies but also in monarchies, and later even in party dictatorships. Generals were included in the Soviet and Chinese politbureaus, but they did not settle the issues of war and peace or determine domestic policy. The military’s role in Pakistani governance and politics is not the norm even in the developing countries. Most of them have now changed course to civilian regimes.

The PML-Q will once again have a difficult time with this issue. It has been put together by a man who was, and still is, the army chief. It was enabled by the military intelligence agencies, and the bureaucracy under his direction, to do as well as it did in the elections of 2002. Thus, it owes not only its organisational existence but its status as the ruling party to General Musharraf. So, what can it say about the desirability of keeping the military out of the country’s governance and politics?

Nothing really, but it will nevertheless claim that the generals are minding their own business, and that they are not dictating policy choices to its government. But this kind of assertion will have no takers. Consider in this connection General Musharraf’s own oft-repeated claim that his “uniform” is what enables him to do all of the “right” things he is doing, including his fight against extremism, terrorism, and anti-state movements.

A country’s armed forces are meant to defend its borders, fight foreign foes, and once in a while quell domestic rebellions. It is hard to say how well the military establishment in Pakistan is situated to do these jobs. It has not fought a full-scale war for more than 35 years, and one should thank God for that, considering that it did not win any of the wars that it did fight.

Its record in quelling domestic insurrections is not much better. Yet, Pakistan is said to be one of the most heavily militarised polities in the world. Higher ranking officers, serving and retired, in great numbers have taken decision-making positions, the command posts, in all kinds of government agencies, public corporations, and even academia. Their presence in these places does not make for better administration. Nor is the fear unjustified that this “civilianisation” of the country’s military establishment may be detracting from its efficacy as a fighting force.

The military’s involvement in Pakistan’s governance and politics has proceeded like a vicious circle. It did not begin as a result of its greed for ruling authority. It was initially called in to fill a vacuum that the politicians’ own incompetence had created. Strangely enough, they did not have much of a commitment to the craft of politics as properly understood, that is, as competitive pursuit of power for advancing the public good. They regarded personal interest as the main end of political power. That being the case, they did not merit respect from other organs of the state.

The higher bureaucrats (Ghulam Mohammad and then Iskander Mirza) were the ones who first invited the generals to seize the government. The latter learned to relish power once they tasted it. They sought to ensure their longevity by discrediting, corrupting, and further debilitating the country’s political system. The weaker the politicians became the more dependent upon the generals they got to be. Even if the generals wanted now and then to take a vacation from overt governance, the politicians sought their intervention to settle their conflicts with their own rivals. As they say, it takes two to tango. The generals would not be able to seduce the politicians if they were not to hold themselves open to seduction. Ms Benazir Bhutto and Mr Nawaz Sharif have recently declared their resolve never again to seek the military’s assistance with their pursuits. Other opposition politicians have declared the same resolve. But it remains to be seen whether, and to what extent, they will adhere to this new stance.

There can be little doubt that this issue will figure prominently in the election debates next year, but it is not entirely clear how the people at large will react to it. We can be sure that the great majority of the politically aware persons will want the military to stay out of politics. But there will be some even in this group who will not be all that emphatic in their disapproval. Comparing General Musharraf’s performance with that of the political regimes that preceded him (those of Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto), they may feel that he has not done a bad job.

The issue may not have that much salience among the rural voters. The creation of a National Security Council, political role of the intelligence agencies, officers heading government departments and public corporations, appointment of generals as university vice-chancellors will not excite or disturb the ordinary peasant and small landowner in villages.

The ruling party will remind us that the country’s economic growth rate has risen. That may be true, but it will not win many votes. Folks will be a lot more concerned with spreading poverty, rising prices, shrinking job markets, failures in education and health care, and numerous other shortages. The opposition will doubtless denounce the ruling party for its failure to provide these amenities. This is not to say that any of them will do significantly better in this regard if any of them comes to power. But their performance may become an issue in some other election, not in 2007.

The writer is professor emeritus in political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, US Email: anwarsyed@cox.net

IN the midst of the debate raging over the Protection of Women Act, Transparency International’s report for the year 2006 comes as a reminder for Pakistan’s complacent rulers and its protesting clerics that the nation’s real and aggravating problem is not gender discrimination or sexual permissiveness but pervasive corruption in the management of public affairs.

Transparency’s latest global corruption rating based on 12 polls conducted by nine independent institutions shows Pakistan at the bottom of the corruption league. This despite the constant harangue of good governance by the government, the deterring presence of a costly National Accountability Bureau and the dominant influence of orthodox elements, who preach and claim to practise pristine Islamic values, on the military and civil institutions of the country.

Taking the South Asian region alone, Bangladesh with its turbulent politics but without military superintendence has, unlike Pakistan, made some effort to climb out of the pit of corruption. India (not long ago bracketed with Pakistan) has drastically improved its ranking to rise above puritan Saudi Arabia. The abuse of public office for private gain, Transparency’s survey shows, is more rampant in the oil-rich Islamic kingdom than in India where one half of the population lives at or below the subsistence level.

Yet another galling fact that the corruption report brings to light is that not even one among the top 30 least corrupt countries is Muslim and, more worrisome, the incidence of corruption in the reclusive kingdom of Bhutan in the Himalayas and Uruguay in Latin America is lower than in Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Libya and every other Muslim country, rich or poor. Thus, it can be inferred that poverty does not necessarily breed corruption, nor does being super rich or Islamic make a nation less corrupt.

How a squeaky clean Christian Finland sits at the top of the table and how an equally rich Muslim Kuwait lingers 48 places below is an enigma that only Islamic scholars and proselytisers worldwide can resolve. But it is difficult to comprehend, much less to appreciate, how our own religious divines can justifiably whip up mass hysteria against a law which does no more than seek to protect women against false accusations of fornication or adultery. Especially as the society they are expected to inspire and purify remains among the most corrupt in the world, one in which the leaders of politics and religion are as much accused of corrupt practices as the ordinary functionaries of state.

The agitation over an innocuous law of limited scope, even if it does not conform to Islamic injunctions as the clerics interpret them, is diverting national attention — much to the relief of the government — from more agonising moral problems like corruption and crime and pressing economic issues like unemployment and inflation.

In Pakistan, corruption keeps rising irrespective of the party or regime in power or the government reforms carried out, because it is viewed in the narrow sense of catching and punishing officials taking bribes. In this approach, instead of ending corruption, the people appointed to trap, prosecute and try the culprits themselves get involved in it. Thus corruption becomes more entrenched.

Some governments in their inaugural zeal carry the anti-corruption establishment to a higher plane giving it the colour of a national crusade, but this soon degenerates into punishing the detractors of the government or winning them over to its side — or at least so it is viewed by the cynics. In either case, whether it is an old-time establishment or a new crusading bureau, some people suffer at its hands and some others might gain — but corruption keeps spreading faster.

Corruption flows from acts of nepotism and from the use of public funds for personal, tribal or political gains. Neither is treated as an offence and both are often justified as a necessary and legitimate part of the democratic process. Corruption therefore has to be stopped at the source and not when it has spread its tentacles wider.

Four instances reported in the press in the recent past may be used to further illustrate this point. First, the Sindh chief minister wants the chairman of the province’s public service commission to be dismissed. The chief minister alleges that candidates had been selected for some government jobs on considerations other than merit. The chairman, in turn, alleges that the chief minister had made up the charge because he (the chairman) had chosen the candidates on the basis of merit defying the chief minister’s direction to select his nominees. The governor of the province has decided to appoint a high court judge to enquire into the chief minister’s charge against the chairman and, hopefully, also to look into the chairman’s countercharge against the chief minister.

Second, a senior official of the National Reconstruction Bureau has alleged that he has been dismissed for not agreeing to the bureau chairman’s direction to invest all community development funds in his constituency.

Third, the chief minister, the speaker and some ministers of the NWFP spent most of their discretionary development funds in their home districts and constituencies ignoring other more deserving areas.

Fourth, the Punjab chief minister helped a foreign party acquire hundreds of acres of prime land near Lahore apparently for an automotive plant while the intended use is for recreational purposes and housing.

The allegations in all four instances fall under the broader definition of corruption and should be so viewed and investigated. The investigators should be professional and independent. A judge, as the Sindh governor has decided to appoint in the public service commission case, could give his findings based on the facts as they are placed before him but he would be neither required nor qualified to dig out the facts and evidence himself.

The first requirement in dealing with the menace of corruption, therefore, is that the facts are discovered and marshalled by professionally trained investigators who cannot be influenced by the prosecutors levying the charges nor by the accused rebutting them. The proceedings should be open to the public. The point is that corruption must be tackled where it begins and, further, favouritism and nepotism must be treated as acts of corruption.

It is a bizarre way of dealing with corruption that the high authorities should not be held answerable for appointing a crony as ambassador while the chairman of a public service commission should face dismissal for appointing, say, his nephew as a teacher ignoring other better qualified candidates. Or a judge bribed into acquitting a criminal should feel immune from action while his orderly is hauled up for receiving a petty sum.

The men of authority and influence, whether in government or in the opposition, in the clergy or in any other vocation, should not delude themselves into believing that they can eliminate corruption while they themselves refuse to be held accountable for perverse or corrupt actions. Pakistan as a nation shall have to live with the indignity of being one of the most corrupt countries of the world unless they are punished first.