PAKISTAN’S political situation today raises more questions about the future of politics and democratic rule in the country than it did in the past. Clearly, democratic rule cannot be engendered through covert deals. Secret agreements made in the name of transition to democracy exacerbate the problem, because any political leader who comes to power using such methods would not want to be exposed to the norms of transparency and accountability.

We get into the old cycle of the military using such leaders who employ questionable methods for coming to power, and then dumping them soon afterwards on the pretext of national security or curbing corruption. It is a game of cat and mouse which has been played for the past 60 years and will continue to be played as long as our leaders are driven by short-term gains and shy away from focusing on long-term objectives.

Notwithstanding individual political alignments, the general understanding in the country is that political parties need to improve themselves as much as the military needs to curtail its ambitions.

The reality is that most educated people, especially the youth, frown upon the idea of Benazir Bhutto or Nawaz Sharif returning to Pakistan. Their contention is that why allow such corrupt people back into the country.

The counter-argument, of course, is that how could one even suggest that the former leaders are corrupt when nothing has been proven against them in the courts. But then, their corruption is a matter of perception. Just because the present regime has failed to prove anything in a court of law does not mean that the former rulers are clean in the eyes of the common man. For him, their greatest sin is that their questionable politics has contributed to the death of the political process in the country. A damaged political party can survive but a maimed political process is lethal.

The educated middle-class, especially the youth, challenges the existing leadership and the people’s ability to remove it through the vote. This is the damaging impact of years of authoritarian rule and the death of the political process when people stop believing in the power of elections to remove questionable politicians.

Sceptics argue that how can the people who are poor, uneducated and dependent on their feudal masters vote without being influenced? Haven’t we seen votes being purchased in the past? Do we expect that in a feudal/tribal system people can vote independently?

These are credible arguments but then the counter-argument is that such a closed political system is the by-product of a civil-military authoritarian system and is top-down rather than bottom-up. This means that the common man is more likely to vote fairly if the authorities stop meddling with the electoral process.

Let’s look at India where people vote leaders in and out despite having the same crisis of poverty and of votes being bought and sold. The autonomy and independence of institutions and the fairness of the electoral process allows people to have greater power to take political leaders to task.

But then, as some would argue, India does not have feudalism which Pakistan does. This is correct but even a feudal system could change once those at the helm of affairs allow people the freedom to exercise their right of choice.

Let’s step back for a minute and look at the connection between feudalism and the state of Pakistani politics. The basic question is: how does feudalism contribute towards peculiar choices at the time of elections?

Pakistan is a post-colonial bureaucratic state where laws, rules and regulations exist to strengthen those in power and the bureaucratic state itself. In such a state, politics is basically used for regime legitimisation and nothing else. In a bureaucratic state, laws are made not to dispense justice but to strengthen the bureaucracy and protect the interests of the most powerful.

For instance, the National Accountability Bureau or the accountability structures of the previous regimes were actually put in place to strengthen the regime and not the process of accountability. In fact, no regime wants to get rid of corruption. The accountability systems were made to strengthen and institutionalise corruption rather than get rid of it.

Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that people should try to align themselves with one powerful group or the other. Since power groups are the only ones capable of delivering benefits to its members or those who align themselves with it, people find it expedient to support one powerful feudal or the other.

Let’s look at the rural life. People vote for candidates on the basis of how much an individual has helped them in their time of need. A number of questions cross their thoughts. Did the candidate help me get my son, brother, husband or close relative out of the police station? Did he/she help me with the registration of my case with the police? Did the candidate help me with the revenue department? Did he/she help me get electricity or construct a road to my village or hamlet?

A close look at the voting pattern in any village shows variation. The total number of votes that a family or individual used to get has decreased, often substantially. The reason that people continue to vote for significant families/individuals in their area is because in the country’s existing socio-political and administrative system no one can survive without aligning themselves with someone powerful to ensure that the system fulfils at least some of their demands.

The civil and military bureaucracy does not have this problem because they are already part of a powerful clique. The common people need to align themselves with someone powerful so that things are done for them and rules and regulations are applied as well.

The popular conception that the common man has no life in Pakistan is true and explains the ethos of a post-colonial bureaucratic state dominated by feudal behaviour. Even educated people would like to challenge the law every now and then to show their relative power.

In fact, there are people who feel proud of themselves for flouting the law. It is a common sight in Pakistan to see the affluent and educated breaking the law and then getting help from an influential friend or family member to flout his connections.

Let’s go back to the miserable common man of Pakistan who does not have influential relatives or friends but only the option of trading his vote for some help and consideration. This common man does deny his vote even to the most influential which explains the variation in the total number of votes cast or number of votes obtained by an individual candidate. But then, why expect this man to change the system or blame his/her lack of education when the real culprits are the powerful, educated and affluent people in state and society?

Ask any affluent Pakistani about why he/she has broken the law and the answer will be because it is necessary to survive. This is as if the state or its systems are a gift from God and not manmade and so cannot be changed. Given this apathy, the common man will wait for his Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif to come and share morsels of the advantages of the state. The problem lies with how the powerful use the state system rather than the lack of education among the poor.

The writer is an independent analyst and author of the book, “Military Inc, Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy.”

E-mail: ayesha.ibd@gmail.com

SEVEN years ago this day, Ariel Sharon, then in the opposition, visited the Islamic holy places in Jerusalem against advice and touched off the second or Al-Aqsa intifada. The infamous visit to the Grand Sanctuary by the Likud chief came two months after the failure of the Camp David summit where President Bill Clinton acted more as an Israeli delegate than as an American president mediating between Yasser Arafat and Ehud Barak.

In the general election early in 2001, Sharon became prime minister and set about tearing up whatever was left of Oslo. He destroyed Arafat’s Ramallah headquarters brick by brick, leaving only his living quarters.

Then he succeeded in getting President George Bush to sabotage his own roadmap, which provided for an independent Palestinian state by 2005. The roadmap had been prepared in consultation with the Quartet — the other three being Russia, the EU and the UN — and Arafat had immediately accepted it. Sharon had dithered but had accepted the roadmap with several reservations.

However, Bush dealt the first blow to the roadmap, which he himself had unveiled to the world in April 2003, by saying that 2005 was too early a date for a Palestinian state to emerge. The coup de grace came later when, on one of his visits to the White House, Sharon prevailed upon President Bush to tell a press conference that Israel would retain portions of the West Bank even after withdrawing from there. The roadmap was dead.

Sharon then proceeded to announce his Gaza disengagement plan — a complete hoax whose real aim was not to vacate the strip along the Mediterranean but to strengthen his hold over the West Bank. Even though the western press went overboard in its praise for the Sharon trick, the real aim behind the ‘disengagement’ was to enlarge the existing settlements on the West Bank by settling there those removed from Gaza.

In the meantime, the separation barrier — the Middle East’s Berlin wall as Arafat put it — was so aligned that it gobbled up more Palestinian land.

Sharon is now in coma, having done his deeds that included repeated massacres of Palestinian civilians, especially those at Sabra-Chatilla (1982) and Jenin (2002). In November 2004, the Palestinian movement suffered another blow when Yasser Arafat died. Yet, in spite of Jenin, in spite of the reoccupation of Gaza and those parts of the West Bank which Israel had vacated under the Oslo accords, the Palestinian spirit remained defiant.

Proof of this came last year when — following the murder of some picnickers at a Gaza beach — Palestinian fighters retaliated, killing two Israeli soldiers and taking two prisoners (‘abducted’, as the western media put it; it is Israel that takes prisoners; its own soldiers are ‘abducted’. Objective reporting).

Today, the Palestinian resistance movement is all but dead. Sharon and the Israeli wehrmacht could not do to the Palestinian spirit what Fatah and Hamas have done between them. The extent of Hamas’s victory in 2006 general election stunned Fatah. It never reconciled itself to the loss of its traditional power base.

The intermittent street battles finally came to an end when Hamas completely routed Fatah fighters in Gaza in June. Neither side tried to maintain peace and make a success of the unity government accord brokered by Saudi Arabia.

Then President Mahmoud Abbas, the man behind Oslo, behaved in a most strange manner. He dismissed Mr Ismail Haniye’s government and appointed an independent, Salam Fayyad, as prime minister. Since the majority in the legislature belonged to Hamas, Abbas made a bizarre move — he issued a decree saying the prime minister need not take a vote of confidence from parliament.

Today, the West Bank and Gaza have turned into two cantons, and the occupied territories have ceased to exist as a political unit — whatever their status under occupation. It will take only a miracle for Hamas and Fatah to bury the hatchet and resume the Palestinian people’s struggle for a state of their own.

UNTIL recently, the Indian judiciary was at war with parliament on who was supreme. The confrontation is far from over. Meanwhile, the judiciary has now thrown down the gauntlet to the media, another pillar on which the edifice of democracy rests. Four journalists, including a cartoonist, have been sentenced to four months each for “lowering the dignity” of the Supreme Court in the eyes of the common man.

The charge against the journalists is that they had committed contempt of court by reporting how the sons of the former Chief Justice of India V.K. Sabharwal had ‘benefited’ from the orders he passed on sealing commercial establishments in New Delhi and how the sons had ‘operated’ from the official residence of the Chief Justice.

The judgment has set two precedents which may be difficult to follow. One, the proceedings were initiated for the contempt committed against a retired judge. The court said that the report tended to ‘erode the confidence’ of the general public in the institution itself.

I do not want to go into the merits of the case — the sealing of commercial establishments and the functioning from the official residence of the Chief Justice. But what I want to point out is that it is the first time that there have been contempt proceedings for writing against a judge who had retired. True, he was the chief justice of India, but judges after retirement ceased to enjoy any hierarchical status.

I presume that from now on every retired judge will be entitled to immunity. It is a tough proposition because there are hundreds of judges of high courts and the Supreme Court living all over the country. Anything said or written about them anywhere, allegedly casting aspersions, can land the person concerned in jail if brought to the notice of the court as happened in the case of the journalists.

The second precedent is that the truth is no more the defence. Not long ago, the contempt law was amended to allow the person held for contempt to prove that what he had written or said was factually correct. All the four journalists — and the paper carrying the report — have said that they stood by what they wrote.

Apparently, the court did not take this into account because it sentenced them to imprisonment. I fail to understand why the truth has not been considered as the defence, despite the amended contempt law?

The judiciary should appreciate the media’s dilemma. Should it tell when it discovers something wrong? This is a difficult decision to make because while doing so, it runs the risk of annoying somebody somewhere. In the case of the government, the tendency to hide and to feel horrified once the truth is uncovered is greater than in any individual.

This is reportedly so because, to use official jargon, the repercussions are wider. What are they? Who assesses them? How real are they? These questions are never answered.

The judiciary, which protects the freedom of speech guaranteed by the constitution, cannot take a posture which amounts to muzzling the press.

If the four journalists had gone wrong, they should be punished. If they are correct, the action taken against them is not justified. That they reported against the retired chief justice does not change the situation.

In democracy, where faith stirs the people’s response, the truth cannot and should not be curbed.

In any case, Justice Sabharwal’s role cannot be left unchecked. Two former chief justices of India have already demanded a probe. They have gone to the extent of saying that Sabharwal’s entire tenure of 15 months should be looked into to restore ‘the faith of the common man in the judiciary’.

They are not hapless journalists. They are two former chief justices of India. The problem that India faces is that there is no law to initiate an inquiry into the conduct of judges. But this is no concern of the common man.

Parliament or the government has to find an answer. There has to be accountability. The constitution provides for only impeachment, a course which is not easy to traverse.

I do not want an institution like the judiciary to lose respect in the eyes of the public. Bar associations and such other organisations in the country must take up the matter and restore the dignity of the court, as the lawyers in Pakistan have done by getting the wrongly dismissed Chief Justice reinstated.

While occupying the office, Chief Justice Sabharwal said that the Supreme Court is supreme. True, but it is not infallible. The judiciary too is accountable. It cannot and should not cross the Lakshman rekha, the limits. Justice Sabharwal should himself volunteer an inquiry into the allegations made. The Supreme Court can itself appoint a committee to do so and if it does not want any outsider, let the committee be composed of judges. But the matter cannot rest at where it is now.

The court, no doubt, is a court of law. But it is also a court of justice.

It means that the court is primarily concerned with the meaning of the law but it is also concerned with the fate of individuals who encounter the law. What is the fault of the four journalists except that they dared to uncover certain actions of the former chief justice?

Look at the other side of the coin; a retired chief justice of the Allahabad high court has become a target of contempt proceedings. S.S. Sodhi quit the judiciary 12 years ago. A petition has been filed against him for his book, The Other Side of Justice, which tells how he followed the then Chief Justice Venkatachellaiah’s instructions to ‘manage the most difficult court’ that had gone off the rails.

The then chief justice later sent Fali Nariman, a lawyer, to find out firsthand why courts struck work virtually throughout UP. Nariman testified that Sodhi was a firm and dignified judge.

Even a cursory reading of the book gives the impression that Sodhi is not a person who would tolerate any nonsense. His book is bold and thought-provoking — it has to be read for this to be felt.

The transparency of the author comes out clearly. He has attributed motives to some of the judges who while on the bench ‘tried to use the judicial process to settle scores’ with the then high court registrar. Some judges have characterised the remarks as ‘prejudicial and partisan’.

This is a natural reaction to Sodhi’s frank speaking. But where is the contempt? He told the truth and that is his defence. I wish the Delhi high court had torn a page from his book before sentencing the journalists to imprisonment.

The writer is a senior columnist based in New Delhi.