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| August 14, 2007 | Tuesday | Rajab 29, 1428 |
Decisions at the grand jirga
1970: electoral success and failed promises
I BEGAN this series of articles on electoral politics and economics in Pakistan with a discussion of the elections held in 1970. That was last week. This week, I will discuss what happened after the 1970 elections produced some decisive outcomes. They led to the emergence of a new political force, the Pakistan People’s Party, which continues to dominate politics to this day.
PAKISTAN today is 60 years old. To say that we have achieved nothing over these six decades is to deny the truth. True, we have made blunder after blunder, committed terrible crimes against our own people, and in the process lost half the country in 1971. Yet it is not a record all that bleak. All said and done, there has been progress, though, admittedly, the rate could have been faster. The literacy rate has crossed the 50 per cent mark. Some other countries, like China, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Kenya, have done better and achieved much higher results. But we had to contend with enormous problems, foremost being the compulsion to spend on defence more than what we could really afford. Also, despite the gross neglect of science over the decades, Pakistan has been able to develop a pool of scientific talent, and when India left us with no choice by testing a nuclear device, we responded in kind and thus could raise our head in pride. In May 1998, Pakistan became the Muslim world’s only nuclear power in spite of being a relatively poor and largely illiterate Third World country with a burgeoning population, large land-holdings under feudal control and elitist domination of the government apparatus. Besides, there was an ill-planned industrialisation process that saw industry concentrated in a few hands instead of being evenly spread, as well as rural poverty, the consequent rural migration, and urban chaos and tensions. These were challenges which called for firm and systematic handling by an enlightened leadership which could mobilise the people’s energies in the country’s development and give them a sense of participation in governance. Regrettably, all this has been missing.
Looking back over the six decades of our existence, what would strike any observer of Pakistan’s domestic scene is the nation’s failure to develop a good democratic system. What is happening today is merely the continuation of a nasty tradition laid down as far back as 1953-54 when Governor-General Ghulam Mohammad sacked the Nazimuddin ministry, which enjoyed the confidence of the Constituent Assembly, and later dissolved the assembly itself. The ambassador in Washington, Mohammad Ali Bogra, was recalled to Pakistan and made prime minister, while the serving army chief, Gen Ayub Khan, was made defence minister in the cabinet in violation of democratic norms. Ayub by then had developed a taste of power, staged a coup d’etat in 1958 and repealed the constitution. This set a pattern in which other generals would show a similar contempt for the Basic Law. Once in power, Ayub did things that later military dictators followed more or less in similar fashion. He pledged to give a new system “suited to our genius”, held a referendum which gave him an over 98 per cent ‘Yes’ vote and then introduced a system under which the national and provincial assemblies were indirectly elected. Following widespread riots in 1968-69, Ayub quit and handed over power to army chief Gen Yahya: the system he had created collapsed.
Two more generals were to seize power — Ziaul Haq in 1977 and Pervez Musharraf in 1999. Both overthrew elected governments, though the former set a new record in tyranny by having his political enemies flogged and hanging the prime minister he overthrew. Both Zia and Musharraf held referendums that lacked credibility, and both made arbitrary changes in the 1973 Constitution to strip it of its parliamentary character. Zia’s presidential system was undone by his own protégé, Nawaz Sharif, while Musharraf reintroduced the changes made by Ziaul Haq and turned the 1973 Constitution once again into a military-civilian mix in which all the powers are vested in the president. Once again the big question is: will this system survive Gen Musharraf’s exit from power? Now Musharraf has plans to have himself re-elected president by the existing assemblies while insisting that he will remain the army chief. This reduces democracy to a mockery. Let Gen Musharraf discard his uniform, and let all those leaders who want to return to Pakistan come home. The cases against them, whether genuine or politically motivated, will be decided by a judiciary that has recently regained its confidence and independence. If at all Gen Musharraf wants to give a gift to the people of Pakistan celebrating the 60th anniversary of their country’s independence, it should be unfettered democracy in the form of a truly free and fair election later this year.
MUCH to the relief of all, the Pakistan-Afghanistan peace jirga has concluded on a positive note. All the right things were said in Kabul about how the two countries should work together to defeat extremism and violence in the region. President Musharraf made his own bit of contribution to the peace process by reversing his decision of staying away from the opening session of the jirga on Thursday. He attended the closing session and his presence lent weight to the conference though it also came as a reminder that the two sides cannot escape the hovering American shadow. Ms Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, was instrumental in getting the Pakistan president to change his mind. The jirga has adopted some practical measures to check terrorism in Afghanistan, which partly thrives on the support it gets from the tribal areas in Pakistan. With President Musharraf conceding this, one hopes that they will now call a halt to the blame game they have been playing so far and do something about the core issue.
It is in that context that significance will be attached to the decision of the jirga to establish a 50-member council to promote reconciliation with the opposition and cooperation between the two sides. Will this council actually deliver? Islamabad and Kabul seem to have got their approach right when they spoke of eliminating the terrorists’ sanctuaries in the border regions and the need to destroy the nexus between narcotics and terrorism. Their pledge to exchange anti-terrorism intelligence while promoting their own economic and social ties is also a step in the right direction. But there are two reservations that will be made after the euphoria subsides. First, it will be closely watched whether this council manages to implement the measures that were agreed on last week at the jirga. The past record of cooperation between the two countries does not inspire much confidence, though.
There is another issue on which some scepticism will be felt. That is in regard to the agreement on pushing for reconciliation with the ‘opposition’, which is interpreted as being ‘the Taliban who agree to accept the rule of law’. This may well be a matter of semantics. Evidently, the need is to counter the forces of extremism and terrorism, by whatever name they may be called. Is it feasible at this stage to open a dialogue with them without a commitment from them to renounce force? With no delegates from Pakistan’s tribal areas attending the Kabul jirga, how will it be ensured that the insurgents will accept these conditions? The accord reached by the Pakistan government with the insurgents in Waziristan came to nothing while it gave time to the Taliban to regroup. What could produce results is joint action by Pakistan and Afghanistan to clip the wings of the extremists and then enter into a dialogue with them. If Kabul and Islamabad act jointly, they may be able to achieve what they have failed to attain separately.
Its remarkable longevity was the result of what it promised the people by producing a number of closely argued “foundation documents.” These papers laid the basis for an election manifesto that pledged to re-establish the political order the British colonial administration had begun to create in what is today’s Pakistan.
The PPP wished to create a parliamentary system of government with considerable autonomy granted to the federating units. It also promised to restructure the economy by giving the state a much larger role so that the benefits of economic progress could be distributed more equitably among different segments of the population.
The electorate was also told that there would be a total reorientation in Pakistan’s foreign policy. The country would seek to follow a more independent course rather than remain closely aligned with the United States. Closer relations would be cultivated between Pakistan and China and Pakistan and the Muslim countries in the Middle East and West Asia. The country would pursue a more aggressive stance towards India, seeking, in particular, justice in the disputed territory of Kashmir.
This proved to be a heady brew for the electorate which gave the PPP an overwhelming victory in West Pakistan. The same elections led to the triumph of the nationalist Awami League in East Pakistan. The PPP won 81 of the 138 seats allocated to the provinces of West Pakistan out of a total of 300 seats in the National Assembly.The Awami League’s triumph in East Pakistan was even more convincing; it won all but two seats out of 182 allocated to the eastern wing. The stage was thus set for the emergence of a two-party parliamentary system in the country.
The elections should have led to the formation of a government at the centre by the Awami League, a political party that strongly supported provincial rights and autonomy. The opposition dominated by the PPP would have advocated social and economic justice for the poorer segments of the population.
These two very different outlooks would have been balanced by parliamentary discourse. What could have emerged from this exercise of democracy might have been a political and economic system that guaranteed greater freedom to the federating provinces while working for an economic structure that protected the poor.
The advocacy of parliamentary democracy by the PPP meant that it should have yielded power at the centre to the Awami League. This it was not willing to do which was the first departure from the path the party had promised the electorate.
Had the PPP followed the course it had laid down in its foundation documents and in the election manifesto, it should have been content to play the role of the opposition in the National Assembly while forming administrations in the Punjab and Sindh. But the PPP’s intransigence eventually led to a complete deadlock between the political forces representing the country’s two wings.
The result was a civil war in East Pakistan and the emergence of that part of the country as the independent state of Bangladesh. Had Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s party acted according to its stated principles, it may have prevented the break-up of Pakistan and the led to the establishment of a durable political system in the country.
This will remain one of the important “what if…?” questions in Pakistan’s history.
My point in raising it here is to underscore the conclusion that the PPP did not act and govern according to the beliefs it had espoused in the period that preceded the fateful elections of 1970.
There were other gaps in promises and prescriptions on the one side and actions and style of governance on the other. While the party — in particular its leader, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto — went on to draft and promulgate a new constitution, it did not, once in power, fully abide by its requirements. This was particularly apparent in the way it treated the smaller provinces of what is now Pakistan.
Had Balochistan and the NWFP been granted the autonomy promised by the Constitution of 1973, some of the tensions that are today the characterising feature of the Pakistani polity might not have materialised. This is one more “what if…?” question in the country’s turbulent history.
The third “what if…?” refers to the economic policies that the PPP government pursued when it acquired power in December 1971, following the emergence of Bangladesh.
As promised in the manifesto, it went ahead and expanded the economic role of the state. It did this by an extensive programme of nationalisation which did not help the poor but created an essentially dysfunctional state. Private entrepreneurship was dealt a heavy blow.
While this was not the only contributing factor in the slowdown in economic growth it played an important role. During the six years that the PPP was in power, the rate of increase in GDP slowed down to 3.9 per cent a year. With the population now growing at 3.1 per cent a year, income per capita increased by only 0.8 per cent. This was the slowest rate of increase in the country’s history.
At this rate, it was inevitable that Pakistan would see an increase in the incidence of poverty which is what happened. This was an ironic outcome for a political party that had built its entire case for governing the country on the basis of helping the poor.
But public policy was not the only reason for the poor performance of the economy. The oil shock delivered by the Arab countries affected all oil importing countries, including Pakistan. There was also an extended period of draught.
Nevertheless, extreme despondency among private entrepreneurs affected investment and contributed to lowering the growth in GDP. The anti-private sector stance need not have been adopted by the PPP government to fulfil its promise of delivering public services to the poor.
This could have been done by reorienting government expenditure and by increasing public sector revenues through pro-poor fiscal policies. The administration could have adopted policies to aid the poor without hurting the private sector and the economy.
There is one other area where the PPP did not deliver what it had promised before the elections of 1970. Its foundation documents and the election manifesto for the 1970 poll had promised a fundamental restructuring of the asset base in the countryside. This was to be done by redistributing land from the large landlords to small proprietors and landless peasants.
The foundation documents had correctly identified highly unequal ownership of land as an important reason for the slow growth of agricultural output, high incidence of rural poverty and domination of the political system by the landed elite that was negatively inclined to seeing a fully representative system of government.
The party was also critical of the land reforms during the Ayub Khan period. However, once the party was in power it followed the same approach by introducing enough loopholes in the two attempts at land reforms. These helped the large landlords to retains much of the properties.
The reforms had a very small impact on the size of holdings and distribution of land. There were no structural changes in the rural economy as a consequence of the policy moves made by the PPP administration. This was another lost opportunity.
The PPP’s style of governance and its economic policies created a great deal of popular resentment; the people felt let down and some of them withdrew their support for the party. This prepared the ground for the return of the military to the political arena. General Ziaul Haq’s intervention broke the cycle of elections that had begun in 1970.
The next election that allowed participation to political parties was held in 1988 after the general’s death, when the PPP returned to power, this time under the leadership of Benazir Bhutto. She was able to rebuild the electoral base her father had created.
However, it was the memory of the promises the older Bhutto had made that propelled the daughter back to power in 1988. She did not have a clear programme of economic and social reform, only the pledge that she would open the political system to wider participation. Her two tenures as prime minister were marked by poor economic governance.
Consequently, the economy performed indifferently, the political system did not develop and space was created for the military to return to power.
As the country prepares for another election in which the PPP once again will be an important force, and in which many people will look to it for solving the immense problems the country faces the question must be asked if it has learned some lessons from its history.
I have reviewed that history in the article last week and in the contribution this week. For me, the following three lessons seem to be important. One, it helps a party to come prepared with a well-developed and well-articulated programme that takes cognisance of the problems the citizens face as well as the opportunities that exist for them. That was done by the PPP before the elections of 1970 and no doubt contributed to its unexpected electoral success.
Second, given the opportunity to wield power, the party must stay the promised course and not abandon it as was done in the 1971-77 period.
Three, the party leadership must allow its affairs to be managed democratically. Only then can it remain in touch with the citizenry. This was done neither when the party gained power in 1971 nor later.Having spent a fair amount of space discussing the PPP’s role I will, next week, look at the performance of the other mainstream political party, the Pakistan Muslim League and its two major factions, the PML-Q and the PML-N.