FOLLOWING Nawaz Sharif’s deportation on September 10, Ms Benazir Bhutto announced her plan to return to Pakistan on October 18 (by which time the presidential election will probably have been settled one way or another). The rationale of her projected return at this time is not self-evident. She left the country of her own accord eight years ago to escape the persecution Mr Sharif’s government had been visiting upon her. A few months later Mr Sharif himself was thrown out.

Her oppressor gone, she could have returned home any time after October 1999. She didn’t, because the new man at the helm, General Pervez Musharraf, despised her as much, branding her as thoroughly corrupt. He was determined that neither she nor the Sharifs would be allowed back into the country. She got the message loud and clear that if she chose to return she would end up in jail.

A year or so ago, the general’s attitude towards Ms Bhutto softened, presumably under persistent American advice. Misreading Pakistani politics, the Bush administration adopted the view that Ms Bhutto’s participation in a government headed by Musharraf would enhance his legitimacy, persuade liberal and moderate forces to line up behind him, and enable him to deal with the extremist militants more effectively. Ms Bhutto did her part to sell this dubious reasoning to her American patrons.

After nearly a year of “negotiations” with Ms Bhutto concerning a “power- sharing” arrangement which were never intended to get anywhere, General Musharraf has finally halted them. He has asked Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain to discuss a possible post-election arrangement with Ms Bhutto.

That arrangement will necessarily depend on what the election results reveal about each party’s status and what it can offer others. Negotiations for sharing power before the elections may be presumed dead.

The problem with the power sharing project has been that General Musharraf’s main support base, beyond the military establishment, is the PML-Q, whose top leaders want no truck with Ms Bhutto.

This is no state secret. Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain has said so openly and repeatedly. On occasion he has added that his party and the PPP have been “enemies” for some 35 years and there is no reason for them to become friends now. He does not oppose negotiations with Ms Bhutto; they damage her political standing in her own constituency, but he would not want them to produce a result that is favourable to her in any way.

This truth seems to have finally dawned upon Ms Bhutto. She now says that if she does not get a satisfactory response from the present government to her package of demands, PPP members of parliament and the provincial assemblies may join other opposition parties in resigning their seats as a gesture of protest against Musharraf’s campaign for re-election as president, and she may join other opposition leaders in launching a mass movement to force him out.

Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain and his associates want to maintain the status quo. They hope the coming elections will reproduce the present lineup of forces in government. In a recent television talk show, he said his party, like all others, wanted the elections to be honest, free and fair. He assured his listeners that government functionaries would not intervene in the electoral process. But he added that individual candidates would most likely do as much rigging as they could.

That being his meaning of free and honest elections, and if what he predicts does happen, no one should be surprised if PML-Q and its current allies come up with a majority in the next parliament. They will then see no reason to solicit Ms Bhutto’s goodwill and cooperation.

The most the Chaudhrys will want to do for Ms Bhutto is to let her get bail before arrest and lead her party’s election campaign. Many people in the country (including Mushahid Hussain Syed if his word is to be taken seriously) believe that the past should be left buried and the government should announce a general amnesty to all politicians for wrongs done between 1988 and 1999.

However, it should be noted also that many others do not share this view. They argue that if the rule of law is to have effect, if the equality of all citizens before the law is to be maintained, Ms Bhutto and all other politicians accused of crimes should have their day in court.

General Musharraf, on his part, would welcome the PPP’s support for his re-election and subsequently for his governance. But while this might be the proverbial “icing on the cake,” the cake itself, which he must have, is made of the support he gets from PML-Q and its allies. The PPP cannot be an alternative to that combination.

If this is a reasonably correct reading of the “ground realities,” one may ask what Ms Bhutto expects to accomplish by returning home on Oct 18. This date may have been intended to signify that she did not want to stand in Musharraf’s way to re-election.

Until a few weeks ago, she was hoping to become the prime minister again. It may now be clear even to her that her elevation to that office is not on the cards. Another explanation may be that she is a politician and head of an important political party, with a lot of influential men and women professing loyalty and allegiance to her, which pleases her. Even when she did not hold high public office, Ms Bhutto represented a political force to be reckoned with. She would like to regain that position.

What are the prospects of her political recovery? In none of the five elections since 1988 did any party emerge with a clear majority in the National Assembly. In two of them, the PPP came out as the largest and in three as the second largest party. The forthcoming elections (if free and fair) will not throw up a majority party in the Assembly.

The possibility cannot be ruled out that the PPP will do less well in these elections than it did in the preceding ones. Being away from the country, Ms Bhutto has not mingled with the people, addressed public meetings, or led rallies for eight years. She has met with assistants and devised strategies, such as they were, sitting in Dubai and London.

Makhdoom Amin Fahim, Jehangir Badr, and Farhatullah Babar have held the fort, so to speak, and kept the party’s hardcore support. But I doubt that they have been able to enliven their party workers and raise their spirits and enthusiasm.

Second, there is admittedly a certain amount of disillusionment in party ranks as a result of Ms Bhutto’s self-centred negotiations with General Musharraf.

Third, Ms Bhutto is bound to be perceived as America’s agent in Pakistani politics, and the widespread disapproval of its policies will rub off on her.

Fourth, she and her associates have taken no clear position on major domestic and foreign policy issues other than routine calls for the restoration of democracy. A report in this newspaper a few weeks ago said that likely winners in the next election, wishing to contest on PPP tickets, had not been found in about a dozen districts of Punjab.

The odds then are that in the post-election scenario Ms Bhutto will be a significant actor — like the Sharifs and the MMA leaders — and she may even be a partner in a ruling coalition, but hers will not be the determining say in the halls of governance.

The writer is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, US.

Email: anwarsyed@cox.net

IN THE midst of heated arguments in the Supreme Court, continuous debates on TV channels and gossip in the drawing rooms marked by concern and sometimes banter, a thought must be given to the question that why, at the end of the day, the fate of every regime in Pakistan, be it military or civil or a blend of both as it is now, has to be decided in the courts or on the streets and not at the ballot box.

Without getting entangled in the age-old argument about democracy being alien to the antecedents of our governance and incompatible with our faith and ideology, one must look at the common strands of failure that have run through all governments since independence — leave out, if you will, the first decade of the founding fathers.

Most persistent and conspicuous has been the tradition to project individuals rather than institutions as the fountainhead of all power and the good or evil that flows from it.

Then comes the urge to earn applause by holding out hopes that cannot be fulfilled and staging spectacles rather than serving the community quietly as a matter of duty.

The third, and most lethal, for the image of every government has been the increasingly extravagant lifestyle of ministers, bureaucrats and party leaders at public expense.

The tendency to glorify individuals and belittle institutions, grandstanding instead of humility, and reckless spending have been growing all along to reach a vulgar, intolerable limit.

The cumulative burden of maladministration over half a century has pushed Pakistan to the very bottom of world rankings in human development, security, corruption, individual liberty and freedom of conscience.

In a political risk survey of emerging markets published recently in The Economist, Pakistan is the last among the 24 countries surveyed. Yet another survey has found Karachi to be the dirtiest city of the world.

All such findings point to the fact that the stability and success of the political and economic order of a country is determined by the strength of its institutions and not the power of individuals.

Political doctrines like the balance of power among the president, the prime minister and the parliament, and the role of the armed forces and judiciary in governance arouse the interest of people but hardly touch their daily grind.

The same is true, to a lesser extent though, of economic indices and statistics.

In any case the claims of every government to development and prosperity in its time are doubted by the people and called into question by independent economists. The claims of the present government are being questioned even by the World Bank, the UNDP and Islamabad’s Mahbubul Haq Centre.

The government contends that per head income in Pakistan is now the highest in the region, and absolute poverty in its time has decreased by 10 per cent.

The publications of three organisations show that per head income is higher in India and much higher in Sri Lanka and absolute poverty in Pakistan has come down by five, and not 10, per cent.

Leaving aside the methods of calculating incomes and poverty levels, what matters to a family is whether its income is staying ahead of the prices. A housewife who prepares Ramazan gift packages for the rural poor reports that the package that last year cost her Rs500, the commodities and their quantities remaining the same, has cost Rs675 this time.

Official statisticians would be hard put to proving that the earnings of an average family have increased by that much, i.e. 35 per cent, in the intervening period.

As far as memory serves, no government in the past 50 years has advertised its plans and achievements more brazenly and expensively than this one. To the understandable annoyance of the people, reality does not bear out the propaganda. The government keeps emphasising distant plans and mega projects while hardships aggravate. A few instances may be recounted in support.

The talk for almost eight years now has been about building mega power projects but not even a mini one has come up. The railways minister dreams of trains running to China and Saudi Arabia and air-conditioned bullet trains within the country.

But a local train for Karachi that he made the president inaugurate in a much-publicised event more than a year ago has yet to be seen. Such is the yawning gap between rhetoric and reality.

Karachi in particular has been the butt of propaganda for political gain. Its former nazim signed 30 MOUs and visited as many countries but ended his four-year term by giving new names to old roads and bridges.

The passion of his much younger and more ambitious successor is for “mega projects”, skyscrapers and call centres which lie beyond the scope and resources of the district government while the basic civic services suffer from neglect.

He plans to build an elevated expressway and many mass transit corridors while the city’s bus service continues to deteriorate.

Karachi must be the only city in the world where commuters travel sitting on the roofs of rickety buses or hanging on to their back ladders.

For the poor and deteriorating civic services, the city administration seeks an alibi in the absence of a master plan, the continued influx of people from the outside and cantonment boards and port trusts not being amenable to his control. He is wrong on all three counts.

Karachi has always had a master plan. It was painstakingly reviewed in the 1970s by Abbas Hussain Shah assisted by experts from international agencies.

He is no longer alive but the nazim could learn a great deal about the plan from Ilahi Bukhsh Soomro who was director-general before him and Z.A. Nizami who followed him. Both are still around and active.

Migration to Karachi is of the same magnitude as in the other large cities. According to Mehtab Karim, professor of demography at the Aga Khan University, Karachi’s population is growing at around three per cent, the same as in Lahore, and not at six per cent as Karachi’s naib nazima Nasreen Jalil made her audience believe in a DawnNews show the other day.

The nazim doesn’t say in what way the cantonment boards or port authorities hinder or impair the management of the city. If he can coordinate matters with 18 autonomous town administrations surely he can with these organisations as well.

The truth of the matter is that the bosses at the three tiers of government wish to wield total power and dispense patronage to advance the cause of their parties and to glorify themselves.

That is how they expect to stay in power and regain it too without worrying about the ballot or accountability. This mindset can change only through repeated elections and not military coups or court orders.

IF THERE ever were a cause for invoking the infamous ‘doctrine of necessity’, which arguably has dogged the prospect of democracy taking root in Pakistan, it is now.

Consider: of what good will Gen Musharraf be, to himself and to the country, if he doffs his army uniform now and graces the presidency for the next five years? Granted, even the devil will have earned a break after a tumultuous eight-year stint at the helm in Islamabad as the global ‘war on terror’ rages on in one’s own backyard in Waziristan, but why a retreat to the presidency?

Retiring to an island off mainland Hawaii or at least to a ranch in Texas will be a more fitting reward. The retired general will be able to exercise just as much influence over the system via the army sitting thousands of miles away as he would from the presidency in his civvies.

Even if the judiciary allows him a second stint in power as the president, there will be little he could manoeuvre besides packing up the house of cards that the next parliament, like its predecessors, promises to be. The real power, as Musharraf would know better than anyone else, will lie with the next man in the Army House.

The presidency is not much of a challenge for a commando; it’s like going back to play a virtual reality game in a parlour with teenagers, after you’ve done the real thing in the real world. Such an uneventful exit strategy is one that ridicules the daredevil the president has been all these very exciting years in power, playing ball with the enemy, keeping suspected friends at bay, conducting political musical chairs while jeering at the contestants from behind the tinted glass. ‘What a comedown, Sir, you should know better!’

One says this because one would like to believe that Musharraf is made of tougher stuff. He alone is the man bold enough to have stood up to growing obscurantism. Cleaning up the Lal Masjid and mopping up that mediaeval brigade was no joke, much less a drill in friendly fire, as some cynics still call it. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Had Musharraf buckled under pressure, exerted by his own handpicked deputies who made no bones as to where their sympathies lay while the gory drama unfolded, he would not have been the man he is.

He not only stood his ground, but also looked more determined insofar as not allowing another Lal Masjid to challenge the writ of the state.

The way he has since offered lollipops to Ms Bhutto and kept the likes of Fazlur Rahman waiting in the wings for the next act, while directing the outgoing act to a climax with Nawaz Sharif, is no small feat. The fate of the last mentioned is a fait accompli, at least for the next three years, as the Saudis will wine and dine him once again in style. The retreat to the presidency, and that too in his civvies, just does not add up as far as the man’s accomplishments, dubious as they might appear to many, are concerned.

There is a truckload of work still to be completed. The jihadi boys running amuck must be brought in line with the state’s new — call it proxy, if you will — agenda, which for once coincides with a national cause. No Ms Bhuttos, Messrs Sharif and the rest of the pseudo-secular leaders put together will be able to curb the threat posed to internal and external security by the militant Islamists. We need a commando to take them on; head on, that is.