5
ANYONE who believes in the transmigration of souls might be forgiven for thinking that the spirit of the late Benazir Bhutto has been reincarnated in another Daughter of the East — Aung San Suu Kyi. No two female leaders in this region share such telling similarities. Not the Sri Lankan Mrs Srimavo Bandaranaike nor her offspring daughter Mrs Chandrika Kumaratunga; not India’s Mrs Indira Gandhi nor her daughter-in-law Mrs Sonia Gandhi; not the Bangladeshi Mrs Sheikh Hasina Wajed nor her nemesis Mrs Khaleda Zia.
Most of them were either widows or daughters of martyrs. Each of them has had to pay that cruel admission fee to enter a political arena in which the gladiators are men. Unlike their sisters in arms, Benazir Bhutto and Aung San Suu Kyi (Burmese call her Daw Suu) had to suffer years of unconscionable imprisonment. Both survived debilitating years in exile (Benazir Bhutto outside Pakistan, Aung San Suu Kyi within Myanmar). Both, nourished over the years by the droplets of continuous support from their followers, gradually crystallised into fragile stalagmites of democracy.
And, finally, when allowed by generals to contest in a general election, both campaigned tirelessly, won with commanding majorities, but then found power denied them by a military junta. To gain what was rightfully theirs, they had to agree on an unworkable compromise which left them sandwiched between a khaki-minded president above and a khaki-uniformed army chief below.
Both Pakistan and Myanmar have seen decades of military rule.
It must be galling for Daw Suu as it was for Ms Bhutto to be conjoined to the military, to be treated as a weak supplicant, just as it cannot be easy for any democratically elected leader to accept that the ballot paper, in dexterous hands, can be folded like some malleable origami into a bullet.
There is not much critics of Ms Bhutto’s widower Mr Asif Zardari are prepared to forgive him. They would, however, willingly join his admirers in lauding the award he made in 2012 of the Shaheed Benazir Bhutto Award of Democracy to Aung San Suu Kyi. It shares a back place on her mantelpiece, overshadowed by the more prestigious Nobel Peace Prize she gained in 1990, and the US Congressional Gold Medal and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
To be honoured thus, even before winning an election, places the recipient on such a high pinnacle of expectation that the only way down would appear to be along the slopes of failure and disappointment. Benazir Bhutto learned this to her cost; Daw Suu has yet to.
Both Pakistan and Myanmar (then Burma) have seen decades of military rule since they achieved independence in 1947-48. At the time, they thought they had quit the British Empire. Instead, each is haunted by the ghost of the earlier relationship between the Mughal court and the East India Company. The emperor may have reigned from Delhi, but the East India Company ruled from Calcutta (now Kolkata). Stretch that analogy a little further and one can detect in the present civil-military equation a filigree of parallel courts, parallel justice, parallel economies, parallel commercial interests, parallel policies, and parallel governance.
Is there a constitutional way that the Pakistan Army (not the naval and air forces, which like the BB award on Daw Suu’s mantelpiece are accorded second place) can share power with democratically elected civilian governments? Is there a way of dividing authority without diluting accountability? Or will each continue to approach the National Action Plan from separate sides of a common imperative?
One security analyst has argued that while civilian governments have the authority, the military machine has the expertise. That is why in the last resort, an American president in any serious emergency calls out the National Guard, and why in the first resort a beleaguered civilian government in Pakistan always calls on the military to rescue the public from its own mishaps.
Pakistan is less a democracy than a laboratory for civil-military relations. If there had been a Nobel Prize for Shadow Governance, Pakistan would have been its first recipient. Myanmar qualifies for next year’s award.
Meanwhile, Ms Aung San Suu Kyi, as the effective head of an NLD-led government, would be well-advised to send a team of her advisers to Pakistan to learn from our experiments. They will soon distinguish, as our elected prime minister is being taught to do by the army chief, between what is possible but impractical, and what is practical but impossible.
Who knows? Our leaders may themselves learn something from her. Her doctors fret that she is seriously underweight. She weighs only 48 kilogrammes. That is light even for a small-limbed Burmese. Perhaps Ms Benazir Bhutto’s successor as prime minister and his weighty cabinet colleagues might learn from the example of her Burmese twin how to limit their appetites to her body weight.
The writer is an author.
Published in Dawn, November 19th, 2015
