October 10, 2004

Soon after taking over power in 1999, General Musharraf had ‘in supreme national interest’ outlined a seven-point agenda to change the fate of the masses. After five years of absolute power, it is an interesting exercise to draw a balance sheet of the imperious rule

ON October 12, 1999, he had “moved as a last resort to save the country”, and he is still at it — saving the country — even after five years of uninterrupted and absolute rule in uniform. The quote above is from President General Pervez Musharraf’s midnight address to the nation on the day he took over the reins of the country after dismissing the elected government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

The general had purportedly moved in to save the country from demoralization, national disharmony, a collapsing economy, deteriorating law and order situation, politicization of state institutions, concentration of power in the hands of a few at the top, exploitation of the poor by the ruling elite, and corruption. This is what one had gathered from the seven-point agenda that he had announced on October 17, 1999.

Interestingly, while announcing this agenda he also revealed that it was not to save the country that he had taken over, but that his armed forces did it to save the aircraft he was travelling on from Sri Lanka, from being hijacked by the former prime minister. But that, of course, is another story.

What is more relevant under the circumstances obtaining in Pakistan today is his seven-point agenda, which entailed:

• Rebuilding national confidence and morale

• Strengthening the federation, removing inter-provincial disharmony and restoring national cohesion

• Reviving economy and restoring investor’s confidence

• Ensuring law and order, and dispensing speedy justice

• Depoliticizing state institutions

• Devolving power to the grassroots level, and

• Ensuring swift and across-the-board accountability

Midway through the last five years, however, he added another point to his agenda; eliminating terrorism from the face of the earth.

And it has perhaps been the last task that has engaged most of his attention in the latter half of his rule of the last five years. Of course, this task has made it a lot easier for him to revive the economy (if achieving macro-economic stability is regarded as such), as the 9/11-related economic assistance to Pakistan was, and still is, rather extremely generous. But here, too, the continued reluctance of foreign investors to take Pakistan seriously has to a large extent made it almost impossible for him to show any meaningful progress on the economic front.

But before we discuss the issue of the economy in some detail, let us first go back to the seven points on General Musharraf’s original agenda, and discuss it in order of the rankings he had himself given to each one of them.

The level of officially-notified national confidence and morale that we see today is very much the same as the one that we saw when our first military dictator, Field Marshal Ayub Khan, had completed the first five years of his 11-year rule. And it was the same as well when the third military dictator, General Ziaul Haq, had completed the first five years of his own 11-year rule.

Like in those two instances, this time, too, it is the military ruler who is exuding confidence, not the people of Pakistan. In fact, like them — Ayub and Zia — at this point in time of their respective rules, General Musharraf also appears to be suffering from an overdose of confidence. And his morale today appears to be as high as was the case with Ayub and Zia when they were completing their respective first five years in absolute power.

And, like the two, Musharraf also seems to be drawing his confidence from Washington, and his morale seems to be high because, like his predecessors, he, too, is being wooed by the US like nothing as he completes his fifth year in the saddle.

As for the nation itself, it is just as confident — or otherwise — today as it has been all through the last 57 years, and its morale, as such, continues to be directly proportionate to the level of confidence.

When it comes to strengthening the federation, removing inter-provincial disharmony and restoring national cohesion, for starters, he failed miserably last year to get the four federating units to reach a consensus on the resource-distribution formula between the centre and the provinces, and then among the provinces themselves.

He has made water-distribution issue even more contentious among the provinces than what was the case five years ago. And on the issues of dams, every time he opens his mouth on the matter, he makes one or the other province react sharply. And recently on the issue of uniform, he has managed to divide the nation right through the middle, with Punjab and Sindh voting for it, and the NWFP and Balochistan going against it.

By going after the so-called foreign militants along the border with Afghanistan without first building a national and local consensus, he has alienated the FATA people unnecessarily. Besides, by deciding unilaterally to build military cantonments in the heart of Balochistan, far away from any enemy location, he has added to the sense of deprivation among the people of that province.

The third point related to economic revival, and, as observed earlier, 9/11 and its consequences have resulted in the creation of a substantial fiscal room for the government. While the overall economic growth rate has touched a significant level in the last two years, with the last year showing a growth rate of 6.4 per cent, the trickle-down effect of this significantly high growth rate seems to have stopped well above the poverty line.

It appears plausible when the detractors attribute the remarkable growth rate in 2003-04 to the purchase of three new Boeings for the national airline. These aircraft were purchased from the nearly $2 billion or so borrowed from the US Exim Bank.

In any case, for the trickle-down theory to be effective in developing countries like Pakistan, their economies need to grow at an annual average rate of around 11-12 per cent. And such kind of growth can only be achieved if the flow of foreign investment somehow improves to around $2-3 billion annually, instead of the meagre $700 million that came in last year, and that, too, was mostly from the privatization process.

Public-sector spending on socio-economic infrastructure appears too little compared to actual needs, as gaps are widening fast and long. The economic managers appear to have been totally brain-washed by the IMF-World Bank theorists and the Washington Consensus. They continue to hope that the private sector would take up the responsibilities being given up by the public sector. But this is not happening. And as long as these managers manage the economy with this outdated and obscure mindset, the gap between the poor and the rich is likely to widen, as it did during the regimes of Ayub Khan and Ziaul Haq.

The fourth point on the agenda was law and order and dispensation of speedy justice. Well, today, the law and order situation in the country is no better than what it was five years ago. The rule of law has completely disappeared from Pakistan. The man in the street has lost all confidence in the system of justice. When he see the ruler himself violating all laws of the land — including the Constitution — without any fear of accountability, and justifying all his illegal acts on the pretext of supreme national interest, they can hardly be expected to feel reassured about the safety of their life and property.

The rule of law is the basic minimum that guarantees that the guardians of the status quo would not keep the poor in perpetual bondage and that there would be equitable distribution of the fruits of development. Its absence, therefore, encourages the law of the jungle in which the powerful takes all. The sectarian violence is continuing unabated. Murder, rapes, kidnapping for ransom and police brutalities have only increased. People in general are as wary of going to the police or to a court of law for redressal as they were before, because these two institutions have become highly exploitative and continue to serve the interests of the oppressors.

General Musharraf’s fifth point on the agenda had promised that he would depolitisize the state institutions. But most of the institutions, including the defence services, today stand more politicized than ever before. The Chief of the Army Staff not only offered himself for a referendum in 2002, but in 2003 he even got himself elected as the president of Pakistan. He says 96 per cent of Pakistanis want him to continue to keep his uniform for an indefinite period. His uniform was the subject of voting in three of the four provinces. Not only this. Through the National Security Council, General Musharraf has politicized even Navy and the Air Force by inducting their respective chiefs in the 13-member supra-parliamentary body.

All other institutions, including the civil service, the police, the judiciary and even the National Accountability Bureau, have become political tools in the hands of the ruler of the day. Both the offices of the president and that of the COAS are supposed to be politically non-partisan, but the general has made both of them completely partisan by patronizing the ruling alliance and persecuting the mainstream political parties.

His victory dance after he had delivered his presidential address to parliament following the passage of the 17th amendment clearly pointed to where his heart is. After the speech, he turned to the treasury benches and saluted them before turning towards the opposition benches to whom he raised his two clenched fists as if warning them to fall in line.

General Musharraf’s promise to devolve power to the grassroots level, which was the sixth point, has remained only that, even though the next local government elections are only about nine months away. The power is still firmly in the hands of the army, with the general keeping a tight leash on this institution as well as on the elected parliament, the provincial assemblies and the local bodies.

At the local level, the traditional feudal is still calling the shots as he has won most of the Nazim seats. It is almost the same story at the level of National and provincial assemblies. Just as the Nazim has his strings firmly controlled by the local feudal, the local bodies remain dependent on Islamabad, and together they are that much less autonomous in their efforts to improve the delivery systems at the grassroots.

Ensuring swift and across-the-board accountability was the last point on General Musharraf’s agenda. The elected parliament and the provincial assemblies speak for themselves on this score. To begin with, corruption of many potential winners was ignored at the time of elections. Next, many of them were accommodated in the cabinet. The claim of eliminating corruption at the top level went by the board when two senior-most members of this government washed their dirty linen in public recently over human smuggling to the United Kingdom. There was this wheat scandal as well, which is still to be subjected to transparent accountability. And the public perception of the NAB is totally negative.

Let us now come to the eighth point on the agenda; terrorism. The general seems to be fighting a lone battle on this front, and this strategy has led to three attacks on his person. No doubt, if he converts this war into a national effort against terrorism instead of keeping it totally personal, he would lose his importance in the capitals of the world where he is today treated like the prima donna. But then what would happen to the country and to this war against terrorism if God forbid one day the general’s luck runs out?

It is, therefore, necessary that he transfers the responsibility of this effort to the nation — through the cabinet and the elected parliament — by taking off his uniform. His seemingly blind faith in his own ability to protect the national interest seems to have kept him from making terrorism a national issue requiring a national effort to overcome it and eliminate it. He is even touting a time-tested and highly effective concept of enlightened moderation as his own, but makes no effort to follow through with measures on the domestic front to translate this concept into a national endeavour.

Actually, it is Musharraf himself who has created the impression that he is fighting the terrorists all alone and on behalf of Washington. He can only dispel this impression if he were to let the democratic process in the country take its natural course, to stop persecuting the mainstream political parties, and to put an end to the mullah-military alliance for all times to come.

This mullah-military alliance was actually set up to promote on the one hand the army’s agenda of nourishing and sustaining a perpetual state of confrontation with India on the excuse of Kashmir, and, on the other, to achieve the so-called strategic depth across Pakistan’s western borders. Now that the army itself is trying to mend fences with India despite Kashmir, and the concept of strategic depth had been hit for a six after 9/11, there appears to be no logic in continuing with this unholy and extremely dangerous alliance which to a large extent has only undermined the supreme national interest of Pakistan in the past.

This brings us finally to General Musharraf’s performance viz-a-viz India. He started off with denouncing both the Simla Accord and the Lahore Declaration. And at Agra in 2001 he refused to denounce militancy in return for India accepting Kashmir as the core issue. But in the joint statement that was issued on January 6, 2004, he promised not to allow militants to use Pakistani soil for exporting terrorism. And then in the joint communique issued after Natwar Singh-Khurshid Kasuri meeting in New Delhi, in the first week of September, he allowed the Congress-led government in India to make him agree to base the future peace talks on the basis of Simla Accord.

One has no quarrel with policies that would bring peace in the region. But one feels very bad to see that national honour and dignity is being sacrifised at the altar of personal ego while pursuing this policy of peace.

And last, but definitely not the least, in the previous five years, Pakistan’s political culture has been completely destroyed — that is whatever was left of it when Musharraf took over on October 12, 1999. This has been done again in the supreme national interest and on the plea that it is pragmatism, not idealism, which needs to be practised in the affairs of nations.

Political patronage is the name of the game today as it was never before. The fact that more than half of the total ruling alliance parliamentarians sitting in the two houses (244 in all) have been obliged with one job or the other speaks volumes about the state of governance today and the level of political patronage that is being practised now.

Today, the election process carries as much credibility — or lack of it — as it did before 1999. And by not handing over power to the elected parliament on the due date in 2002, General Musharraf has actually turned the parliamentary system of government on its head, and made it into a presidential one without even getting the Constitution amended accordingly. And, now, by refusing to take off the uniform, he is making another valiant effort to bring the army in to keep it out (as this will bar a new coup for as long as he kept the uniform).

So, in the last five years President General Pervez Musharraf has effectively succeeded in pushing the country back to where it was on August 16, 1988, when we had a president in uniform heading an elected parliament. So much for his promise to usher in genuine democracy.

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