THE chosen representatives of the people, supposedly embodying their collective wisdom and virtue, have elected Asif Ali Zardari to live in the majestic and luxuriously appointed presidential mansion in Islamabad for the next five years, and possibly longer.

If in sending Mr Zardari to the presidency the PPP elders thought they were ‘kicking him upstairs’, where he would be rendered harmless, they made an error of judgment. Nor of any avail will be his own post-election statements affirming the supremacy of parliament and the president’s subservience to it, and saying that he will not oppose moves to trim the president’s powers.

He may have made these statements because they sound good, not because he intends to implement them. He may, for appearances’ sake, allow constitutional amendments that reduce the president’s role to that of a titular head of state. The likelihood is that even after such amendments have been made he will continue to have a directing role in this country’s governance. What can be done to mitigate this perversity?

If he cares for appearances, we recommend that he quit the co-chairman’s office in the PPP. He represents the unity of this republic; he is president of the people of all its regions and persuasions. It is therefore in the fitness of things that he should belong to no political party. Second, as we all know, his influence with the PPP notables derives not from the party office he holds but from the fact that he was married to the late Benazir Bhutto, daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the party’s founder. The party notables show him deference not because he has done anything to earn it but because he is related to the Bhutto family.

Given Pakistan’s political culture, it would not be improper for President Zardari to share his thoughts on issues of public policy with the prime minister. In doing so he should recognise his own limitations. He has had no experience of statecraft. He may in time become statesmanlike but that remains to be seen. The best course of action for him would then be to limit himself to participation in the making of high policy, leaving its implementation to the officials concerned. There are several issues on which a coherent policy has to be made. Mr Zardari says he wants parliament to be supreme.

In that case, after he and the prime minister and any others whom they may have wanted to consult have come up with the analysis of a problem, including the means of meeting it, they might take their thinking to parliament for its input.

The foremost among these issues is the challenge posed by the militants. There are members in both Houses of parliament who maintain that dialogue with the militants, and not resort to force, is the way to go. Mr Zardari can join the prime minister and his cabinet in identifying the terms of reference for this dialogue, which is another name for negotiation. If it is to go anywhere, the parties must be willing to make compromises.

A political issue involving, let us say, access to material resources, may be resolved through mutual concessions made as the dialogue proceeds. But mutual concessions are not likely to be made, and dialogue will then have no function, when the contention is ideological, involving issues of right and wrong.

In our present situation the government may usefully negotiate with non-ideological militants concerning local autonomy, management of local resources and local customary law.

However, there can be no dialogue with the Taliban who want to enforce their version of the Sharia, which most of the rest of us do not accept. They themselves want to be the enforcers. They want to abolish the state of Pakistan as it is presently constituted and establish their own dictatorship in our land. Mr Zardari’s government should bring out these facts in parliament. If Qazi Hussain Ahmad and Maulana Fazlur Rahman still want a dialogue, let them be sent as a delegation to talk to Baitullah Mehsud and then let us see what they bring back.

The present government, like its predecessors, spends hundreds of billions of rupees more than the amount it raises in revenues. It borrows at home and abroad from governments, banks and international lending institutions.

It gets the State Bank of Pakistan to print money which it spends, driving inflation to unprecedented levels. It runs huge budget and trade deficits. If Mr Zardari wants to do something about this crisis, he should get the prime minister and his deputies to devise ways of reducing expenditures. They should also reconsider globalisation, free trade and wholesale privatisation which do not suit us.

Crime control and restoration of law and order are equally urgent problems. The task here is to identify the means needed, set up and streamline the relevant organisations, and find the money to pay for them. There are other problems that need to be sorted out — insurgency in Balochistan, status of local governments, management of water resources, revenue-sharing, and delivery of essential services, relations with America and India, among other things.

We can be sure that Mr Zardari will have a directing role in this country’s governance to some degree. We do not know if he has the will and wisdom required of a good director. We have to date seen him handle only one major issue of governance (that relating to the deposed judges), and his performance in that case has not been reassuring. He did not want them to be reinstated but did not want to say so.

Some of them have been ‘reappointed’ upon swearing to uphold the constitution mutilated by Pervez Musharraf, thus indicating they have been made to affirm that Musharraf’s imposition of emergency rule and the actions he took in its pursuance, were valid and that their own refusal to honour it was wrong.

Delay as a way of tiring out the other side was Mr Zardari’s favourite tactic in dealing with problems. It worked with the judges who were deposed more than 10 months ago. But it will not work with the Taliban, restoration of law and order or rectification of the budget and trade deficits. Let us then hope (and pray) that he will learn and adopt other ways of resolving the nation’s problems.

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

anwarsyed@cox.net

FOR Pakistan, Sept 9 can prove to be a turning point or a catastrophe. Whatever it is, it will not be for historians to record at some distant date but for us all to see in the weeks and months ahead.

For Asif Zardari it has been a turbulent journey from a playboy to a prisoner to a president. There are instances of widows riding to power on the sympathy wave for their assassinated husbands. Close to home, and not far back in time, Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka and Khaleda Zia of Bangladesh rode this wave but, perhaps, no widower of an assassinated wife had done so before Mr Zardari.

It is a measure of the grief felt on the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and compassion for the tragedies suffered by the Bhutto family that her husband, who remained under the shadow of corruption in her lifetime, became the president of the country so soon after her death — and through a process that has been generally acknowledged to be free of corruption.

The wave of emotion that has carried Mr Zardari to power will surely subside as fast as it had arisen. His wife’s memory will not be able to sustain him long in the high office he now occupies. His own past, however, will return to haunt him sooner than he expects.

Asif Zardari says, and tiresomely repeats it, that he will change the system. That was attempted by men abler than him and in conditions more conducive to change. They succeeded in only wrecking whatever system there was. Even if he has a clear idea of what his new system will be, and is able to muster the courage and resources to enforce it, the problems of the people are far too pressing to wait.

All that Mr Zardari can and must do is to give the country a clean and impartial administration. Sadly, all actions of the government led by his party over the past six months point in the opposite direction. Anyway, irrespective of the president’s position in the constitution (as it is or after the Seventeenth Amendment is repealed), for the people at home, and the Americans too, it is now Zardari’s government. And the first decision to make a new start lies with Mr Zardari himself.

The administration cannot be impartial so long as the head of state who is virtually also the head of the government is not himself impartial. And that he cannot be, or at least will not appear to be, so long as he is head of the party as well. Mr Zardari, therefore, must vacate the party chair and resign his membership of the party.

Over a long period of time and at a pace accelerating with every successive government the career public servants, the judges no less, have tended to become an extension of the political arm of the government. In other words, they are expected to go by the direction set by the ruling party and look after the interest of its activists rather than go by the rule of law. That hazard is now greater than ever before.

A distinct advantage that the presidential system has over the parliamentary one is that neither the president nor his ministers are dependent on parliament to stay in power. Thus they feel no compulsion to coerce public servants to go against the law or equity to favour one or the other group or individual in parliament. In the system as it is now evolving, the apprehension is that the president and the prime minister will both try to keep the parliamentarians in good humour at the cost of good administration.

Just as the judiciary, in order to be independent, must not be under the control of the executive, or beholden to it, the executive in turn should also be independent of the legislature if it is to remain neutral. Any civil servant of any vocation would be forthcoming to testify that he was much more free and fair in doing his duty, i.e. if he wanted to, in the regimes of Iskander Mirza, Ayub Khan, Yahya and Ziaul Haq than during the tenures of political governments. (It is difficult to say the same for Musharraf’s government as he leaned on the defecting parliamentarians right from the beginning).

The problems facing the people today — insurgency, sectarian violence, inflation, unemployment — will take a long time to resolve. Mr Zardari’s arrival on the scene will not bring their solution any nearer. The excitement generated by fireworks and jazzy adverts paid for by the state, on the other hand, will give way to despair as the problems persist, even aggravate. The only way for Mr Zardari to keep the people content and their hopes alive is to give them an administration which, uninfluenced by his ministers, legislators and cronies, does whatever little it can to mitigate their hardships.

An impartial administration has many dimensions. Instead of indulging in a harangue on how it can be assured, it is easier explained how it is subverted by giving some examples drawn from the party-based governments from 1988 to 1999 now back in the arena.

— Through a painstaking process a number of ASIs were selected for a provincial police force. A tussle then started for giving some posts to political nominees which ended up in all posts going to them. Those nominees now occupy key positions in the law and order set-up.

— A senior official posted to a municipal office to supervise the octroi collection was beaten black and blue by the goons of the mayor’s party and driven back.

— Enormous pressures were exerted (i) to promote an engineer as chief engineer over the heads of a score of better-reputed engineers, and (ii) to depute a Grade 18 official to hold a Grade 21 post in a corporation.

— The private guard of a minister took his gun out in front of the chief secretary of a province when he refused to do his master’s bidding.

The list is endless. Politicians now returning to power will be only reliving their rout of the nineties if they were to try to hold (as they did then) good administration hostage to political expediency. All indications, sadly, are they will and thus once again bear out what Hegel, the 19th century German philosopher of dialectical reasoning, had to say: governments have never learned anything from history or acted on principles deduced from it.

kunwaridris@hotmail.com

ROTI is riot spelt another way. Roti excites and is the most basic of all stimulants. People may be approached at the most ungodly of hours but they mind the interruption when they are having their roti or meal.

At the tandoor, the situation heats up just as a respectable patron tries to jump the queue with an excuse that is too very mundane to be peculiar to him: “I have guests waiting” or “Mera saalan thanda ho jayega” (“My food will be cold”).

What is a norm at home and in the bazaar is also prevalent at the shrines. The announcement of roti leads to a flurry of activity among the faithful seeking to isolate themselves from the world and its lusts. It is only to be expected then that the mention of the word has that kind of an effect on the politics and politicians of this country.

Roti is an eternal first item on the agenda of the biggest and currently power-hungry political party in Pakistan.

In the context of Lahore though, the Pakistan People’s Party can forget the roti and concentrate on the next two items on its list of priorities — kapra (clothing) and makaan (housing). Their reluctant allies in Punjab and the allies of these allies have taken it upon themselves to provide cheap food to the people at large.

After winning the World Cup and setting up his cancer hospital, Imran Khan has opened a few cheap tandoors (eateries with the oven as their main feature) in Lahore. Those in need — which means practically everyone — can have a roti for Rs2 from the tandoor and a naan, a slightly proud and swollen version of roti, for Rs3.

At the apolitical tandoors of the city, the roti is being sold for somewhere between Rs3 and Rs5 and naan for Rs5. Their weight varies in accordance with the needs and wants of the bakers. But then, can any of these other tandoors be called apolitical?

Soon after the cheap tandoor started its operations, the government of Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif decided to match Imran Khan’s offer. The Punjab government announced that it was going to ensure that roti was available to the undernourished from bakers at Rs2. The officials have been in contact with the representatives of flourmills and the bakers to bring the prices down. It is a long chain actually where the government has to subsidise the price of wheat for the millers to be able to provide flour to the bakers at a rate where selling a roti at Rs2 is affordable.

As the equation stands at this stage of the negotiations, a 20 kg bag must be available to an ordinary baker for Rs250 to enable him to sell rotis at Rs2 per piece.

Evidently not thrilled by the Punjab government’s seizing of the initiative, members of Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaf say they are selling rotis at Rs2 per piece when 20 kg of flour costs them Rs300. They are prepared to sell one roti for Rs1 if the price of a 20 kg bag is fixed at Rs250.

The government for now has limited its promise of cheap loaves to Ramazan. There are justifiable calls that demand a more durable solution since people have a habit of continuing to eat beyond the holy month. In any case, while it may have the upper hand now, in the long run, the pro-poor PTI will be hard pressed to beat friend PML-N at this game. For, along with education, wheat has been a favourite refrain of Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif ever since he came to power in Punjab.

Initially, the chief minister was all for an across-the-board subsidy on wheat flour. He began by acknowledging the presence in the province of the rich who weren’t bothered if they had to buy 20 kg of flour for Rs3,000. But he added that while the members of the affluent group would also benefit from an indiscriminate cut in the flour prices, it would be evened out since they were levied with higher taxes under other heads.

Following a few meetings with his kitchen cabinet and a federal government scheme in the name of Benazir Bhutto, the chief minister had a change of heart. Now he is all for a selective application of the subsidy under a Punjab government programme with the potential to rival the federal plan to woo the poor. Simultaneously, he is trying to make sure that the subsidy given by the province should benefit its residents instead of its fruits accruing to Pakistanis and others living outside his jurisdiction.

The possessive grip of Punjab over its wheat has prompted a media discussion where other provinces have declared similar rights over what they transmit — electricity, gas, etc. — to outside consumers. This aspect of the problem is, however, yet to trouble the press in Lahore which is happy to relay pictures of people using sacks to build their defences against a shortage of flour.

In classical terms, it is a shortage if you want to believe it. As a pro-Sharif newspaper displayed courtesy a photo caption, a man carrying four sacks as a souvenir from his Sunday bazaar conquest is actually proof of the easy availability and abundance of flour. This is politics at its most basic.