| 04 May 2002 | Saturday | 20 Safar 1423 |
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Hold the champagne
As the official media bombards the nation with statistics indicating a massive victory in the referendum for General Musharraf, both the opposition and the public are questioning the validity of these claims.
Speaking for myself, all the polling booths I saw in Karachi last Tuesday were practically deserted, and I must have driven past at least a score of them on my way to and from work. When I went to vote in the morning, there were half a dozen men in line ahead of me, and none of our thumbs were marked with any kind of ink. Clearly, the sudden MQM boycott in Karachi had been highly effective in keeping voters away.
The pattern in the rest of the country was fairly similar. However, the government managed to garner a heavy turnout in state organizations, factories and prisons. The problem is that public and media perceptions have been shaped by the forlorn polling stations and the bored election staff. And in politics, it is perceptions that count. Thus, in a stroke, Pervez Musharraf has suffered a sharp loss of credibility, his most precious asset.
Unfortunately for the general, the damage has been entirely self-inflicted. Although his victory was a foregone conclusion, this referendum was always about the size of the turnout: Pakistanis remember all too well Zia's farcical referendum of 1984 in which barely 5% of the electorate bothered to vote, and the government claimed that 60% of the voters had supported the dictator's bid to hang on for another five years. Now we are faced with a situation in which the results are again controversial with a corresponding loss of credibility.
According to newspaper reports and independent observers, many incidents of bogus voting were seen. One young man claimed to have voted 18 times; a school teacher stamped 350 ballot papers because, according to her, she had been given a target of 500, but only 150 women turned up the whole day, so she made up the difference; scores of cases of underage boys voting at several booths were reported. One reason it was so easy to stuff the ballot boxes is that as there were no competing candidates, there were no polling agents present to protect their candidates' interests.
With this background in mind, those in power should go easy on the champagne while celebrating this Pyrrhic victory. Indeed, perhaps in a day or so they will count the cost of the whole exercise, and I do not mean the horrendous expenditure incurred on this entire surreal business. Apart from the inflated numbers being put out by the Election Commission, Musharraf has suffered a serious erosion of respect and affection through his bizarre campaign. Most people wondered why he was aping the very politicians he professes to despise when he had no opponents.
Surely his long, convoluted televised speech in early April was enough to set the stage for the referendum: if anything, his rallies, with their forced requisitioning of public transport, their rent-a-crowd and their attendant inconvenience to the public, switched voters off.
Another major loss General Musharraf has suffered is that his long honeymoon with the press has come to an end. Ever since he seized power through a coup in October 1999, the independent print media has been highly supportive of the general and his reforms. But this crude circumvention of the constitutional process to elect the president has alienated many of his supporters.
Predictably, the Supreme Court has legitimized the process, thus living up to its reputation in public eyes as well as in the legal fraternity.
Since September 11, General Musharraf has been the darling of the West. His support to the US-led 'war against terror' won him many friends in Washington and other western capitals. From being a pariah, he became a welcome friend overnight. This goodwill has stilled some American criticism of the referendum, but the western press has been almost uniformly hostile to the whole concept. How long it will take for this disenchantment to work its way into policy will be determined in part by the needs of the battle against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, but clearly, Musharraf's image in the West has lost its sheen.
Both internally and externally, Musharraf was perceived as a straight-talking, well-meaning soldier who was very different from the politicians who have caused so much damage to both the economy and to whatever institutions that had remained intact. In short, he held the moral high ground. But if the real results of the referendum are perceived to be at odds with those announced by the Election Government, a crisis of confidence could well shake the seemingly firm foundations of the military government.
Even assuming that the general has won by the stated majority of around 98% with a turnout of 44 million, what next? With general and provincial elections due in October, a very strained relationship between the president and the elected prime minister and his party seems inevitable. Indeed, given the low credibility of the Election Commission after the referendum, it is doubtful that the opposition will accept its supervision of the October polls. The tensions and strains that will surface will hardly lead to a more stable Pakistan, although that is Musharraf's goal.
Until the army chief announced the referendum three short weeks ago, most Pakistanis were quite happy to let him continue. He had handled the economy well; he took the only sane route open to him in the aftermath on the terror attacks on the United States last September; and his generally liberal approach was welcomed by the majority. But by opening the Pandora's box of the referendum, he took a big gamble that might backfire.
One major cost we cannot quantify immediately is the unification of virtually every political party across the spectrum on the anti-referendum platform. Now that Musharraf has openly stated his intention to stay for at least five more years and completely dominate the scene, he has left the entire political class no option but to oppose him.
In the words of an editorial in the current issue of The Economist of London: "....It would be better, for clarity's sake, for Mr Musharraf to remain the dictator he is, and step down when his job is done, than indulge in this bogus referendum. Such exercises serve only to give democracy a bad name."
