Hanged by a diamond necklace?
Will that political phoenix Benazir rise once more from the ashes, or will the diamonds be forever? General Musharraf had pronounced her politically dead long ago. The fact that the news of a Swiss magistrate’s sentence had such national political import shows just how wrong he was; but perhaps the somewhat wishful statement is now closer to realization.
The accusations are old, and have been gone through here as well. However, accountability as existent in Pakistan has no consistency or public credibility, even when entrenched powers and investigators have less at stake in the outcome than they have in the case(s) of Benazir Bhutto. Sentence from a famously neutral republic, though, is not viewed through the same cynical prism. Why should or how could Swiss judicial infrastructure be pressurised or misled? It has to be seen how damaging the Swiss endorsement proves to Benazir’s political licence. How deeply will it affect her personal standing with the electorate that stayed hers through so much else?
What makes Benazir unique in Pakistan’s politics is that she is real. She is not a projection of the ISI; she was not nurtured as a counterbalance to another political party or its leader; and neither opposition for opposition’s sake nor doctrinal lip- service for survival determine her political orientations and party leadership. She may be dynastic, but she is not engineered; and however limited she may be by negative elements of the status quo, she is never politically hostage. For that reason alone, flawed as she is, it would be tragic to lose Benazir Bhutto. Without her the democratic future of a civil polity for Pakistan is set back, possibly irreversibly, in terms of time as well as substance. To put it another way, the destruction of Benazir Bhutto’s leadership of the People’s Party has been the unremitting effort of every military dictator and oligarch: they must have had a reason.
What is the reason that the PPP’s abiding vote-bank loves the tarnished heroine? Superior intellects would say it is nothing more than sentimental loyalty and ignorance. Implicit is an assumption, rather undemocratic, that such people count less because they do not know better. A further argument is that they are their own worst enemies and need to be minded like children. It is for such simple-minded sorts that roadmaps, guided democracy, PCOs and LFOs and the likes of Mir Jamali are devised.
That traditional backbone of democracy—the educated middle- class whose intelligentsia once supported her — has largely remained unforgiving of Benazir and does not disturb dictators. This disillusioned constituency needs to be distinguished from sections of the educated middle-class that identify themselves with a militarized status quo and feel threatened by the mass empowerment that is so linked with the Bhutto tradition. Serious-minded democrats and progressives find it hard to excuse the frivolity, if not the peculation. Benazir in her first term was seen as not having been given a fair chance and so merited another. But in her second tenure, she was seen as having taken the wrong fork in the road. Nothing positive can be expected of her.
But what would be a positive development in the present Pakistani political context? Each phase has its buzzwords, ours at present are macroeconomic development and good governance. We have had almost three years of an environment where politicians have been curbed and carefully purged and where the regime has availed itself of total freedom of action. It has also in the post-9/11 context been widely favoured internationally. It has gone through an electoral exercise and the unedifying picture of the resultant parliament is before us. Yet even so, General Musharraf as president is not smelling of roses.
Macroeconomic development is not filtering down to the microcosmic level of the average citizen; and as far as good governance goes, from an LFO originator’s point of view, citizens can begin blaming the reinvented democratic government for deficiencies instead of asking the dictatorship to deliver. Advocates of the military crutch recommend time and patience for macroeconomic benefits but regard democratic political effort less patiently.
There is no reason to treat the course and orientations of macroeconomic development as inseparable from Musharraf protectionism. The same IMF expertise would be as easily available to any installed government or as hard for it to avoid. In fact, Ms Bhutto and Mr Sharif can each justifiably claim some sound economic reform and development programmes. But it is not modish to recall this. In like vein, the current lack of good governance is debited to parliament but signs of economic recovery are credited to the GHQ.
Supporters of the military stress that neither General Zia nor General Musharraf enriched themselves. But there are more debilitating violations of the rules and principles of a decent law-abiding polity and constitutional government. Corruption and deceit in public office are a grave violation of the mandate for the common weal - so is the deforming yoke of dictatorship. But repulsed by corruption, and offended by lying denials, are we ready to exchange democratic values for political and economic stability?
The answer to that question is: Can we?
No, we cannot. This is not to contradict the statement that people do not care about LFOs, etcetera, as they are too worried about the basics: potable water, water for crops, a daily wage, a chance to go to school, to reach a doctor. The point is that people will only get these, along with equality and justice — words they may not know but concepts they cherish — through equitable social and civil development, which only comes with participatory democratic evolution.
For macroeconomic development to flow downwards and avoid the backlash of Ayub’s pattern of economic expansion, the leader’s power must stem from the people to whom leaders are answerable. As indeed Benazir and Nawaz Sharif were: successful dismissals were pulled off on a basis of popular rejection. But the Eighth Amendment and the LFO empower oligarchs and keep the law-abiding electorate (the heart of a democracy) at bay. It is the right of the people to vote in and vote out a government, not the right of an overstepping umpire to blow the whistle on parliamentary games. Furthermore, after prime ministers are removed arbitrarily, witch-hunts facilitate their popular recovery, while the return to electoral office and subjection to the litmus test of performance remains blocked by artificially emplaced regimes. This is one of the reasons for Ms Bhutto, Mr Sharif, and voters being stuck in a groove.
At present, pre and post-election management has left us with an electorate that feels vaguely cheated and installed a government of legal framework. The popular mood is characterized by frustration or defeatism that finds virtually nothing to identify itself with at a national level in the state. Such alienation and dislocation is fraught with social menace. But the regime is in a strong enough position to ignore what it cannot coerce or seduce. Mass agitation carries a heavy price which no one is in a mood to pay. The regime argues this means there is no real discontent. This is a dangerous fallacy.
Admittedly, the mainstream political parties in combined opposition to government by LFO lack street-power, and have a considerable amount of egg on their face irrespective of diamond necklaces around the lady leader’s neck or the Sharif family’s exit strategy from jail. However, it is the opposition’s increasing inability to launch a mass agitation that should most disturb us. For it means that the escalating public social disorder is becoming less and less responsive to control or management. Organized political expression and effort are massing. The word for what may then lie ahead is anarchy.
Rather than wait for control of impending chaos to turn unabashedly fascistic, those who put Pakistan first must come to terms with the reality of the necessary role of mainstream political parties. Socio-political grievances and aspirations are most properly routed through these parties rather than left to erupt or seek subterranean passage.
General Musharraf is given to saying he has nothing against these parties, but only against their corrupt leaders. A singularly obtuse statement from someone who has been in the thick of Pakistan’s politics for some time: he already has these parties separated from that leadership. Their strength may carry on rising in the house, but not in the country. There it is the Bhutto-led PPP and the PML led by the Sharifs that matter.
Benazir Bhutto is progressive. Her personal standing is of a federally effective leader. And she makes Mr Sharif necessary: the PPP and the PML(N) are symbiotic in a positive two-party federal democratic equation. The notion of condoning their abiding leaders’ offences may be hard to accept. But consider the stress factors in national politics: sectarian, ethnic, provincial, doctrinal, institutional. Can these be managed by fragmented, competing, manipulable political elements and personalities? Federally viable unifying political party leadership is of the essence. The stark reality is that the country needs the restoration of Benazir Bhutto and the Sharifs as positively oriented functional political factors much more urgently than it needs the return of their monies.