REMEMBER the slogan ‘it is the economy, stupid’ coined by James Carville who helped Bill Clinton win the White House in 1992? Carville persuaded his candidate to look at the issues the United States faced at that time from the perspective of economics.

Could we apply the same principle to understand the dynamics that is behind the current confrontation between President Pervez Musharraf and his opposition? How much economics can we use to explain this battle between the regime and its opponents?

After recently returning to Washington following a brief stay in Pakistan, my American friends have frequently asked me to explain to them what was happening in my country. “If the people are as unhappy with the decisions taken by President Musharraf on Nov 3, why aren’t they marching in the streets of Pakistan?” I was repeatedly asked. “Why have the masses chosen to watch the confrontation between the government and the opposition from the sidelines? Isn’t there a tradition in Pakistani politics that the street becomes actively involved whenever there is great unhappiness with those who govern?”

These are legitimate questions and they need answers. There are two groups of people whose behaviour needs some explanation. I will contend that economics provides only partial answers and that too for the behaviour of only one of these two groups.

The two groups I have in mind are the professional classes and the poor in the urban areas. The poor were actively involved in the agitations that brought the demise of the regimes of Ayub Khan (in 1969) and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (in 1977). They were inspired mostly by economic concerns but they were motivated by politicians they trusted. This time around, they have been largely absent from the political scene. It is suggested that the reason for that is economics; the poor are so poor that they can’t afford to miss a day’s wage in order to vent their political feelings.

The problem with that explanation is that the poor were even poorer in 1969 and 1977 and yet that did not prevent them from marching in the streets of Lahore and other major cities.

The reason why they entered the fray then was that those who led them to the street promised real changes. In 1969 it was mostly Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who galvanised the poor and had them come out in the street to agitate against the government of Ayub Khan. The government had come under fire not for harming the economy — the GDP during the period of Ayub Khan increased at the rates unprecedented in Pakistan’s history — but because of the perception that the benefits from growth were captured by the rich.

Mahbubul Haq’s finding that “22 families” were the main beneficiaries of Ayub Khan’s growth model proved to be the match that ignited politics in the country.

Bhutto added his own slogan — “roti, kapra, and makan” — to that of the 22 families. The 22 families finding was about the past; roti, kapra and makan, was a promise about the future.

The 1977 agitation saw a reversal in the roles played by the main political contender, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. He was now not the agitator but the one who was the target of the agitation. This time the issue was trust. Six years of rule by Bhutto convinced many people that what they had been promised was not delivered; that the leaders were more interested in preserving their power rather than helping the poor. The religious parties and the mosque were active in that particular agitation. They were trusted more than the Bhutto regime.

This time around the leaders of the two largest parties can’t lead because they were discredited by their times in office. Also, while Zulfikar Ali Bhutto went to the people with a well articulated programme of action, nothing similar has been attempted this time around.

None of the parties that claim to represent large segments of the population have come out with programmes of social and economic reforms that could galvanise support for them.

This time there is nothing equivalent to “roti, kapra, and makan”. People are being asked to place their trust in the leaders who have already been tried. Why should they believe that this time the leaders will behave differently if they were to be placed in positions of power?

Then there are the professional classes who are spearheading the movement against the regime. Lawyers, journalists, teachers, and now students are risking all to have their voices heard.

They are the members of the new middle class that was energised by the policies pursued by the government they are now opposing. The economy’s rapid growth during the Musharraf period — it is about 50 per cent larger compared to the time when the general staged his first coup d’etat — has increased the number of people who belong to this economic class.

The regime’s policy to liberalise the press and the electronic media gave this growing class a voice which they began to raise to demand one thing the regime was less willing to grant — the right to participate openly and without checks in the country’s political life. There is considerable irony in the fact that the regime’s economic and media policies adopted over the last eight years have given power to the groups that are now opposing it.

If politics explains the absence of the poor from the streets and if economics is partly the reason for the presence there of the professional classes, what are the options available to the two sides? How can the regime and its opponents settle the dispute that is grievously damaging Pakistan?

If a new political leader arrives on the scene, it is not inconceivable that he (or she) may be able to get the masses out.

Such a person will have to be a new presence, not tarnished by the previous deeds in office. But there is no Zulfikar Ali Bhutto waiting in the wings to assume the people’s leadership.

It would, therefore, take time before the people can be convincingly and effectively led on to the political street. The regime would find it very difficult to overcome the pressure that would be exerted on it if the masses and the professional classes were to come together to fight it, to coalesce to achieve a common goal.

The other way out for the regime is to reach out meaningfully to the professional classes it is fighting at this time. It is these groups whose support the regimes needs in order to achieve its professed economic and social agenda.

If the aim is to modernise Pakistan — to get it to grow in a sustainable way in the economic field; to educate and train a large number of people to work in the modern sectors of the economy; to develop art, culture and literature so that obscurantism can be effectively challenged; to get accepted without misgivings into the global economic and social systems — the regime must reach out to the people whose number its policies increased and to whom it once gave a powerful voice.

JUST because it suits America that elections proceed on the playing-field as levelled by General Musharraf on Nov 3, it doesn’t necessarily follow that we should start looking for a catch. Nor does it mean that an election, where commission and caretakers have been carefully sifted to keep the chaff, is weightless and should be boycotted.

Why should voters or the opposition reach foregone conclusions about electoral participation and outcome because the result of the dialogue or hearings with the General is that he shuts the nation’s ears and the speaker’s mouth when his prescience tells him he may not like what is about to be said?

‘Our’ Pervez — let’s call him that as we feel him so close by us in any emergency and we have a titular problem as the general is presumptively retired and the spanking new presidency presumptively (or just) notified — ‘Our’ Pervez and Pakistan are so close that his emergency became the country’s. So passionately possessive is he in his love of the country that other citizens don’t get a chance to join the national love fest to show love their own way.

So we have Our Pervez and he has the country. A good arrangement by democratic ISO touchstones. It doesn’t matter that these don’t exist. In fact it rather helps. We don’t even need a Provisional Constitution Order (PCO) to tie up that loose end. There is every hope that elections 2008 will do what elections 2002 did: give the nation the kind of parliament Our Pervez finds so agreeable that he won’t need the handy Eighth now-into-eighteenth-or-is-it-nineteenth-version Amendment and we will have another parliament that runs full term and only becomes problematic in recyclable waste potential. Perhaps a PCO-3 will address that issue.

The conventional wisdom is that boycotting elections costs a party dear. But perhaps boycotting principles that are defining is also pragmatically disastrous. This election is not a matter of choosing between political parties. The events since Mar 9 have raised this fundamental choice: do Pakistanis want constitutionality as devised and ratified by a consensually respected parliament in 1973, post-East Pakistan crisis; or are we content to be ruled — not even as by the British for the Viceroy was accountable to the laws behind the powers that authorised him — but by individual caprice empowered?

General Musharraf refused to be sacked and appropriated executive political power in 1999. In 2007 finding the modifications of his first PCO not good enough, he crafted to sustain his growing exigencies in relation to an independent judiciary he gave Pakistan’s subjects another PCO-— constitutional amendment being unviable at that point. But for the courage of the judges who do not yield and the committed-to-freedom media that endures continuous asphyxiating pressure as it will not die, such antics would have left Pakistan an international clown — a constitutional Punchinello. This election is a referendum on Constitution 1973 warts and all or PCO 2007 a wonderful job of paint. It is about whether we collaborate in our own constitutional disenfranchisement or resist it. If our constitutional rights are revoked and subject to redefinition what framework are we voting in? The vote irrespective of its outcome is nonsense. In that sense a boycott or otherwise is quite possibly not that critical.

So much political falsehood has engulfed Pakistan that the only thing that can be established is the truth. Truth stands clear whether in victory or defeat. What is the truth with the common public about the judges who have lost position and those who gained it? What is the truth about government propaganda when oppositional propaganda is scrambled?

If Mian Nawaz Sharif is left jail-free despite the changed perspective of PCO 2007 is the political weight of that the same as Ms Bhutto’s not being jailed whether in the perspective of a deal, the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO) or eventually a constitution gone missing? Would Imran Khan not have been jailed as gaining in nuisance value and then released as having gained further nuisance value by any incumbent with the administrative clout?

Under ‘Our’ Pervez’s PCO Pakistan’s electoral agenda is subject to uncertainty. The schedules and stipulations of today may be revised tomorrow. We live by PCO functionalities. When ‘Our’ Pervez plays it by ear so will everyone else whether they are piping to his tune or not. The opposition can take its time deciding about the boycott. Besides, participation today may not be participation tomorrow. And there is one decision the meanest, humblest voter takes for himself: The decision to go to polls. Ballot boxes can be rigged but physical presence cannot.

It can of course become a punishable offence not to vote. But then who is to distinguish the volunteer from the conscript? The simple truth is that an election that does not satisfy the people will have as little or as much meaning as a judiciary and legislature that satisfy the executive first and the people later. ‘Our’ Pervez may hold polls and fulfil the letter of his law but the configuration of his political problems will remain stubbornly the same.

AFTER the disasters in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia, the misery and bloodshed in Palestine, and worldwide anger against America, President George Bush desperately needs a foreign policy success in the final year of his ill-starred term.

So a group of US Mideast allies has been pressed into reluctantly appearing at a hastily-arranged meeting at Annapolis, Maryland that Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice claims will lead to a final Palestinian-Israeli settlement over the next year.

The attendees includes Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Palestinian semi-leader Mahmoud Abbas, and delegations from US Arab allies. Syria, which fears a joint US-Israeli invasion, debated whether it was more dangerous to come or stay away. Now it has decided to participate. To no one’s surprise, Iran was not invited to Bush’s Maryland clambake.

Israel’s strategy has long been to talk about talks about peace while steadily continuing to expand by building settlements on the West Bank and the former Syrian Golan Heights. According to Israeli human rights groups, Israeli settlements and military bases now occupy over half the entire West Bank.

Just to make sure nothing is achieved at Annapolis, Israel’s parliament rammed through a vote that any change in the status of Jerusalem would require a two-thirds vote instead of a simple majority, an impossibility under the Knesset’s fragmented party system. Next, Olmert issued a new demand that the Palestinian leadership and other Arab nations recognize Israel not just as a state but as ‘a Jewish state.’ This means the 20 per cent of Israelis who are Muslim or Christian would become non-people.

West Bank Palestinians have been squeezed into arid land and squalid towns forming a giant outdoor gulag, reminiscent of the science fiction film ‘Escape from New York,’ filled with misery, crime, 50% unemployment and malnutrition, all surrounded by Israeli ‘security walls,’ checkpoints and hilltop settlements.

Mahmoud Abbas can’t even control his own extreme factions within Fatah who launch attacks on Israelis. Israel responds to each pinprick attack with massive force.

Meanwhile, Washington and Israel are trying to starve Hamas and Gaza into submission while building up the ineffectual but obedient Abbas.

The Bush Administration’s goal is to get Israeli PM Olmert to agree to a feeble Palestinian mini-state made up of tiny cantons. But even this political Potemkin Village faces fierce opposition in Israel.

Equally important, as election year nears, US Republicans and Democrats are vying to pander to the hardline positions of Israel’s expansionist right, ignoring the 50 per cent of Israeli voters who support a real land for peace deal. As one of Israel’s finest thinkers, Uri Avnery notes about the US, ‘the Jewish and Evangelistic lobbies, together with the neo-cons, will not allow one critical word about Israel to be uttered unpunished.’

In America, failure to fully support Israel means political or professional suicide. This means Bush will be most unlikely to put any pressure on Israel to create a viable Palestinian state.

The only peace plan that would work is being ignored: the 2002 Saudi proposal calling for a return to Israel’s pre-1967 borders with some rectifications.

Nothing will happen without US pressure. But Bush won’t seize the last chance to do some good for the world though he could at least try. Israel is happy with the status quo. The Palestinians and other Arab states too weak and divided to achieve a solution to the world’s biggest international headache.

THE year 2007 has been one of such bitter-sweet politics. A deposed Chief Justice galvanised a movement just because he challenged the military state and pried open the lid of seething discontent and misrepresented citizenry. For this, he gets deposed again.

A set of lawyers followed this opportunity to regain the political, transparent and institutional path to democratic rule rather than the back-door means. For this, they get betrayed by pragmatic politics.

A media that has historically played a critical role even while in chains, offered addictive, incisive reporting along with tasteless, mind-numbing programmes. It was merely following the divine rule of transnational capitalism — unlimited choices. For this, they get unplugged by the mecca of middle-east capitalism.

Meanwhile, the debate on whether a uniform maketh the man was buried. A country that leads global indices in honour-based crimes, corruption, military spending and poverty, did not warrant declaration of emergency.

A symbol of absolute and unyielding power did. We also saw the resurgence of debate, argument, disagreement and eventually after the Nov 3 street protest. But it has been a new-age wave; one not driven by anger of a people who want to reclaim the state. Rather it is one of polite hope.

A flower-power generation, that seeks peace from a military state, political leadership from a cricketer, and wants to replace guns with guitars, has arisen amidst all this.

This may explain why there are some pockets of ambivalence about a dictator who has ruled this country with unprecedented militancy. Some commentators have pointed out the role of collaborators in disguising what was essentially a one-man rule and decision-making process that was exclusive and myopic.

Others have furthered this by pointing out the sheer incompetence and opportunism of opposition parties that makes them sway in the direction of power promising deals. A few have pointed out the ineffectual civil society that has whittled down to project-driven, apolitical NGOs and dissipated revolutionary romantics.

What is clear is that some forms of political resistance can be impotent unless they challenge structures and power relationships.

Hence, the lawyers were dangerous both because they threatened a legitimate removal of a military dictator and that their numbers gave them institutional and representative credibility. They also had alternative leadership.

Civil society organisations haven’t developed the same way. This is because despite the fact that in the past few years, there has been incredible class-based struggles from Okara to Sui, displacements and disappearances, unprecedented numbers of violent atrocities against women and ethnic and tribal uprisings, we have not been able to merge these into a collective force.

Instead, it has become the concern of civil society to act as paramedics in these crises whereby we intervene, negotiate, lobby the state for some safety nets, patch and bandage up the victims, monetarily compensate sometimes and look for the next crisis that requires ‘management’.

We have stopped problematising issues and instead look for solutions and in effect follow the same feel-good, temporary approach that is manifest in the philosophy of corporate responsibility.

There’s a fear of conflict that is more threatening than the routine conflict we live our daily lives through. The state has successfully made us believe that while we must fear our own people as extremist monsters internally, we should portray a liberal and moderate image globally.

Not only are these two artificially constructed divides intangible and unreal, they carry no material concern. Unless we critically bring into the discussion the issue of what we want to restore along with our abused constitution, in terms of structural re-distribution of resources, new visions of power relations between the centre and the provinces, the military’s role and relationship within the global arms trade and the national political economy, the idea of change will not appeal or convince those who cannot and do not want to live on ideals.

What we should not succumb to is using only the blunt instruments of protest such as parties and melas, important as they are. Trends and tastes change overnight within the youth generation but the systemic, economic, power-bases are here to stay and it is those that need to be understood, linked to the larger cause and continuously challenged long after the dust settles down – or not.