Oddities of governance

General Pervez Musharraf appears to have placed himself beyond the pale of law and the Constitution in determining the dimensions of his role as president. A few days ago, he urged Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India to keep the peace process going.

A few weeks earlier he called for a law to ban "honour killings". More recently, he has announced the establishment of a national commission on human rights. He has proposed the constitution of a committee of scholars, jurists, and legislators to reexamine the Hudood ordinances.

Following the sectarian killings in Quetta (March 2), he declared his resolve to wipe out extremism and terrorism, and directed the interior minister to take all necessary measures for protecting the lives and property of citizens, and for apprehending those responsible for the massacre. He has been issuing the same directive on similar occasions since then.

General Musharraf is the architect of our current political landscape. The elections of October 2002 were managed to suit his priorities and preferences; post-election negotiations between the PML-Q and other major parliamentary groups proceeded under his guidance; and the moves to exclude the PPP from the process of government formation in Sindh were planned with his approval.

It was on his "advice" that the PML-Q named Zafarullah Khan Jamali as its choice for the post of prime minister. The driving force behind the merger of several PML factions has come from him.

Is this proper? Let us see how our Constitution envisages his function. Articles 90 and 91 vest the executive authority of the federation in the president, and require the prime minister and his cabinet to aid and advise him in the exercise of his functions. One may assume that these provisions are to be read in light of the guiding principle laid down in Article 48, which says that the president is to exercise his functions in accordance with the advice of the prime minister, his cabinet, or an appropriate minister.

One may assume that he can counsel the prime minister regarding a policy issue or a contemplated administrative move. But there is nothing in the Constitution to support the view that he may direct a minister or a civil servant to follow a certain policy or course of action.

Even if we assume that Prime Minister Jamali does not object to his intrusions, it is clear that the general is not according the Constitution due respect. Given the fact that he is sworn to preserve the Constitution, his transgressions must be regarded as not lawful and unbecoming.

Why is he acting in this fashion? His detractors will say that he is simply lusty of power to the point where constitutional proprieties are swept out of his way. Another possibility may be that he thinks he understands the dictates of the national interest better than others do.

Flatterers may have brought out and enlivened a latent inclination to think of himself as the "deliverer". Nothing new here. In our own experience at least three men possessed of the same delusion (Ayub Khan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and Ziaul Haq) have preceded him in office.

Why don't the victims of the general's transgression reject his advances? They are docile because they don't have an option; it is not much of an exaggeration to say that they are his creatures, owing their present positions to his political manipulation. Let us take the case of Mr Zafarullah Khan Jamali, the functionary whose turf the general invades the most.

The Jamalis are not counted among the more prominent Balochi politicians. At one point Mir Jafar Khan Jamali (Zafarullah's grandfather) became particularly indebted to Mr M.A. Jinnah who had argued and won a problematic case involving 150,000 acres of land for him at the Privy Council. He supported Mr Jinnah's politics against that of Gandhi and Nehru. Later, he supported Miss Fatima Jinnah's election campaign against Ayub Khan. But the Jamalis supported Mr Bhutto and the army in suppressing the insurrection that developed following his dismissal of the Bizenjo-Mengal government in the province.

Zafarullah Jamali switched sides between the PPP and PML a couple of times. He has served as chief minister of Balochistan twice, each time rather briefly, but even so he is not a politician of the first rank either in terms of political skills or nationwide standing and support.

Mr Jamali remains vulnerable to adverse pressure, and it should not take much of an effort on the general's part to twist his arm. But apparently Mr Jamali's vulnerability, and the resulting docility, are not considered enough. Attempts are afoot to weaken and intimidate him further. Alternative names for the post of prime minister, notably that of Mr Farooq Leghari, crop up from time to time as if Mr Jamali were holding the fort only on a temporary basis.

In a meeting presided over by Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, PML-Q MNAs from Punjab have recently rebuffed Mr Jamali by dismissing his candidacy for the post of the party's secretary-general (proposed initially by the Pir of Pagaro). Some of them argued that Mr Jamali should be more than content with the prime minister's office which, more appropriately, should have gone to Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain.

Acting on his own initiative, or more likely at the behest of others at higher rungs of the political ladder, Syed Kabir Ali Wasti, "senior" vice president of the PML-Q, has of late been hounding Mr Jamali. He wrote to General Musharraf last April, alleging that Mr Jamali's "incompetence" had lowered the party's standing and damaged the national interest, and that he should therefore be removed. He has been saying the same to the press.

Acting as if he himself has had nothing to do with Mr Wasti's adventure, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain has professedly called upon him to "explain" his anti-Jamali moves. But instead of tendering an explanation or an apology, Mr Wasti is persisting in his campaign. In an interview with a Lahore newspaper on May 7, he predicted that Mr Jamali would resign his post within 90 days, because the "concerned quarters" were unanimous in the view that he had failed to implement General Musharraf's agenda and generate popular support for him.

Mr Jamali does seem to have been rattled to some degree. On May 17, Mr Wasti complained to Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain and General Musharraf that the prime minister had instigated protest rallies against him in Sindh. The following day Mr Jamali called him on the telephone in an effort to mollify him. He is reported to have said to Wasti: "Syed Badshah! Why are you angry with me? We have no dispute, and if there is any, let us sit together and resolve it." Wasti is reported to have told Jamali that his differences with the prime minister were based on "principles," not on personal grounds.

Mr Wasti is by no means one of the tall men of our national politics. He used to be president of a small and rather obscure PML faction, called the Qasim group. Considering that Mr Qasim himself had never made any waves to speak of, the headship of a faction bearing his name could not have given Mr Wasti reason to brag. But he is trying to move up. A few days ago (May 17), he announced that Musharraf had "full authority" to decide whether, or how long, to keep his army post. The general, he claimed, was a "statesman," who had already accomplished great things, and he would settle the uniform issue in the larger national interest.

It is not inconceivable that Mr Wasti has been acting with the knowledge and concurrence of Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain and General Pervez Musharraf. To all appearances, Mr Jamali has been speaking and acting as if he were one of the general's meek subordinates. He has said it in so many words that he works for the general and takes orders from him. At the same time, he has shown Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain more than due deference. He denies the periodic news reports that speak of a rift between the two men.

Mr Jamali says he makes his decisions in consultation with the party president, and we know that, more often than not, he goes to the latter's home to discuss matters instead of calling him to the prime minister's house. Shujaat Hussain has said the party must direct and oversee government policies and performance, and Jamali has not voiced any objection to this extravagant position. How much more docility does anyone have the right to expect from the prime minister of Pakistan?

It is possible that the "powers that be" are haunted by the fear that the ghost of Mohammad Khan Junejo might reappear in the person of Zafarullah Khan Jamali. Mr Junejo, it will be recalled, learned a great deal, and very quickly, from the job itself. He rose to an entirely unexpected level of self-confidence and self-assertion, high enough to reject Ziaul Haq's dictation. It is hard to say if Mr Jamali will walk in Mr Junejo's shoes. But it may well be that Musharraf and Shujaat do not want to take the chance.

It is bad for democracy, and it is against the national interest, to place our prime minister in the impossible position of having to contend with two extra-constitutional bosses.

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

E-mail: anwarsyed@cox.net

Tentacles of extremism

In reacting to the sectarian violence in Karachi, the policy pundits of Islamabad have made two elementary but serious errors. Sectarian violence is not a problem peculiar to Karachi, as they make it out to be, nor does its recurrence and magnitude show the failure of the local or provincial administration.

Karachi has become a metaphor for violent sectarianism just as it has for its economic activity, ethnic and cultural diversity and tensions, and for its enormous wealth and vast poverty. Everything gets magnified here or tends to spiral out of control. So does violence.

The assassination of a senior theologian and two massacres of Shia prayer congregations and more deaths and arson in the street rioting that followed represent not the failure of the local administration but of the whole gamut of state policies and systems. No one government since 1971 is to be blamed more than the other for this failure. However, the recent experiments made with the established political and administrative structures must be singled out for the intensity of the sectarian hatred and inability of the administration to cope with its bloody consequences.

President Musharraf is right in pointing out that the root cause of extremism lies in political and economic injustice and that the remedy lies in conciliation and not in confrontation with the West. To that end, Musharraf urges the Muslim countries to "infuse life" into the OIC which is in a "state of near impotence".

This is a view of extremism, in a world perspective, as it manifests itself in suicide bombings by the Palestinians and Israel's brutal retaliation, or in Muqtada al Sadr's bloody battles with the American army in the vicinity of the holy shrines of Iraq. Hardly any member-country of the OIC, with super- rich Brunei at one end of the Islamic spectrum and anarchic, poor Somalia at the other, would share Musharraf's optimism. Each one has its own national interest in trade, defence and diplomacy overriding its Islamic sentiments.

Musharraf's real preoccupation, however, should be with Pakistan's home-grown extremism which, like international terrorism, may have its roots in injustice and deprivation but has its tentacles spread into laws and public policy, administrative and legal institutions, legislatures and political parties, social behaviour and school syllabi and every other conceivable sphere of public and private life.

While he harangues the world at large, he should look inward and contemplate whether extremism in Pakistan has declined or increased in the four years and eight months of his absolute power. In common view, by whatever yardstick is used to measure extremism, it has not just spread but turned more vicious. Two strikes at houses of prayer killing 50 persons and hurting a larger number in a span of three weeks has no precedence in Pakistan's sectarian mayhem which dates back to the very first year of independence.

Sectarian hatred and violence have both been growing because on the side of his "enlightened moderation" Musharraf has nothing to show but exhortations. Despite all the measures he initiated to check extremism, he has given in to bullying from the pulpit. He referred to Kemal Ataturk's secularism but once; he has not been able to bring himself round, despite promises at intervals, to review the blasphemy and hudood laws.

He reintroduced joint electorates but created a special list for a particular denomination in order to appease the clergy. He has leaned on the sectarian elements to secure his presidency in the Constitution and continues to pay back the debt to date - the latest effort in this direction was the appointment of the leader of opposition.

The list is embarrassingly long but the trend appears irreversible, as his chief political supporters subscribe to the agenda and the sentiment of the reactionaries, and all progressive forces have been driven to the sidelines or are out of the ring altogether. One of the first to denounce the purging of school textbooks of factual distortions and religious prejudices, for instance, was the head of the ruling Muslim League. That has stalled the whole process.

Islamic sects or schools of thought in the subcontinent have always been more contentious than elsewhere but have seldom gone beyond passionate declamations for they never aspired to capture state power. Now that they do, old schisms and skirmishes have taken a violent turn. What Karachi has witnessed over the past few weeks is but the most tragic manifestation of the pursuit of secular power by contending religious groups.

To distract attention from the power tussle, alibis are sought in conspiracy theories. The city nazim, the governor, the prime minister all at their levels think it is a conspiracy to destabilize their governments and, finally, a conspiracy against Pakistan and Islam. To appease the hurt and angry people, an enquiry is ordered or an official is suspended. The next time round it will be the same drill.

The truth should now be squarely faced. In a country where 96 per cent of the people are Muslim there is no place, or job to do, for Islamic parties. They are bound to be parochial or sectarian. This is the root cause of the violence. It may abate or escalate depending on how just or unjust, caring or uncaring, a government is but it is never far from the surface waiting to erupt.

Turkey, Egypt, Algeria, Indonesia, Malaysia and some other Muslim countries have applied their own remedies to drive sectarian or militant elements out of the politics of governance.

Pakistan has to look for one of its own, more concrete than sentimental rhetoric or an airy-fairy solution like providing computers to madrassahs.

Money or equipment given to the madrassahs to modernize their teaching will not change the mental outlook of the teachers or the taught nor would the stipend paid make an imam shed his prejudices. Look at the Karachi madrassah (it is more like a university) of the late Dr Mufti Shamzai. It is held to be an enlightened and apolitical place of learning. Yet Shamzai is its third teacher to be assassinated in recent years, its pupils went on a loot-and-burn spree after each tragedy. It counts among its alumni Mullah Omar, who lives by fighting, and Maulana Azam Tariq, a founder of sectarian politics.

Religious violence has hardly ever been amenable to normal preventive or punitive administrative actions. It is even less so now that suicide bombers are among its perpetrators and thousands of mosques are the target. The security provided can be no more than a policeman or two hanging around a mosque. Even that would keep thousands of them occupied without being able to stop or catch a culprit.

The country's law-enforcement agencies are not trained nor equipped to deal with terrorism.

Even their capability to deal with conventional crime is hampered by the ongoing turf war among the district, provincial and federal governments in the wake of the devolution plan. The governors and ministers, MNAs and MPAs, nazims and councillors all want control of recruitment, postings and transfers of the police force without owning responsibility for its performance.

Musharraf, once the chief executive of Pakistan, should tell the people who is now the chief executive of the country, of the province and of the district, or if there is none in his scheme of checks and balances who is responsible for the maintenance of law and order at each level.

The fact is that while the terrorists are trained and organized, the officials expected to stop and counter them are confused and rancorous, and the elected representatives above them lack both conviction and credentials.

In this situation, no change in faces or in government would help. Politics and administration both being in disarray only the people, through a fresh and fair election, can give a new policy direction. Everyone in power wants peace and harmony while they remain in power. That will not happen.

Watching the assembly line, left and right

How expensive are four little words going to prove: "Who invited them here?" According to highly non-confidential and totally non-exclusive sources, this was the reaction of Mrs Sonia Gandhi when she discovered that Amar Singh and Ajit Singh had dropped in for some dinner at her home. Amar Singh, Mulayam Singh Yadav's deputy and strategist of his party's handsome victory in Uttar Pradesh, is not a gatecrasher by either habit or inclination.

But even when Mrs Sonia Gandhi learnt that the master of ceremonies, Comrade Harkishan Singh Surjeet, had invited him she was not mollified. Nor did Amar Singh's offer of unconditional support from 37 MPs impress her. Even prodigals are welcomed with a fatted calf. Amar Singh received a cold sniff that could be heard from Delhi to Allahabad. And although food was served to the unwanted guests, Congress leaders refused to share the pariah table at which Amar Singh dined. Mrs Sonia Gandhi's message was clear: a feast is not a famine.

On the face of it, this was odd. A patched-up coalition can do with all the support it can muster, particularly when the central plank of the coalition, the Congress, has only 145 seats, and the second largest bloc, the Marxists, are not willing to confirm their credentials by joining the new government. To drive away an existing or potential friend is poor politics at the best of times, as the BJP discovered at such high cost in the elections.

If the BJP had stuck with the DMK and the Indian National Lok Dal, and wooed Sibu Soren in Jharkhand, it might have been a very different story.

So why did Mrs Sonia Gandhi literally drive Amar Singh to the point where he was forced to say that he would never again go to 10 Janpath?

Mulayam Singh Yadav's response has been to ask Comrade Surjeet to explain why Amar Singh and the Samajwadi Party were humiliated. The easy answer is personality problems. It is also wrong.

Ego does matter in Indian politics. But at best it affects decisions, it does not drive them. Sonia Gandhi and Sharad Pawar have no particular fascination for each other, but they know that if they do not coexist they will not exist in Maharashtra after the assembly elections of September.

This explains why Sharad Pawar is content with the agriculture portfolio he has got in the union cabinet. He can take credit for the Rs 500-crore package for drought-affected farmers in his state that was a priority decision of the Manmohan Singh government.

Pawar cannot ensure rain from heaven, but he can ensure manna from Delhi.

The politics of Delhi will be heavily influenced by the impending struggle for power in the states. Assembly elections are due in Maharashtra, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Bengal and Bihar in the next two years, while in Uttar Pradesh the Mulayam government is dependent, ironically, on Congress support. In other words, an election is all but certain there too.

Within a week of the dinner incident in Delhi, the Congress in UP decided that it would fight the next assembly elections alone. This is not a final decision, but it is indicative of the new confidence within the party.

The simple fact about UP is that both the SP and the Congress cannot win in the state; one has to displace the other. It is a struggle for survival, and Sonia Gandhi's aspiration to revive the Congress is as legitimate as Yadav's need to preserve his fortress. Their contest includes a tussle for the Muslim vote, and Yadav has the advantage of having - possibly to the surprise of the voter - lived up to his promise to support a non-BJP government in Delhi.

After all, he did offer unconditional support, and can now claim that it was not his fault that it was not taken.

Sonia Gandhi, similarly, knows that if the Congress has to rise above 145, the party has to recover in UP. The last time the Congress won in this state was in 1984, when Rajiv Gandhi swept all before him. Since then, the pre-eminent party of India has been whittled towards the margins, barely able to enter double digits.

Sonia Gandhi has less space for manoeuvre in Bihar, where Laloo Yadav has not left much wiggle-room. He has indicated that he wants early elections, since the Lok Sabha results have restored his morale.

Sonia Gandhi may be able to hand over railways to Laloo in Delhi when he wants Home, but as far as Bihar is concerned Laloo is the king. He will decide when he wants the elections, and he will decide who gets how many seats. If Sonia Gandhi bargains in Bihar, it will be at the cost of weakening her government in Delhi: the exchange rate is not in her favour. Bihari Congressmen must therefore wait for another five years before Sonia Gandhi is in a position to ignore Laloo in the way she has ignored his fellow Yadav in UP.

On the other hand, if the Supreme Court indicts Laloo, the Congress will get a chance to displace him in Delhi. Laloo believes that the cases against him were politically motivated, and now that the politics of Delhi have changed, the judgments of Delhi will also change. However, power in Bihar is his main meal; the cabinet post in Delhi is merely souffli: nice, but not substantive.

The elections in Kerala and Bengal are the last on the calendar, and so problems emanating from them are last on the list. Last, but perhaps also the most difficult.

The Marxists, who see the destruction of the BJP as the immediate and necessary political goal, have made life easy for Sonia Gandhi by staying out of the central government. Is that generosity for five years or a temporary reprieve?

The answer will come when the assembly election comes nearer. The Congress cannot surrender Kerala and put up a mock fight in Bengal to appease the left. Nor can the left afford any generosity, if for no other reason than that its space is restricted to these two states and Tripura.

The contradiction before the Marxists is apparent. They cannot say that the Congress is running a fine government in India but will be a disaster in Bengal or Kerala.

The logic wears thin. This is why the Bengal and Kerala leaders so strongly opposed participation in the central government. Pleading that the left is supporting the Congress in Delhi only to keep the BJP out might work only to a limited extent. Bengal is of course the key.

So far, brilliant electoral management and some luck have kept the anti-incumbency factor muted in Bengal. But Indian democracy, as Chandrababu Naidu has discovered, can be dangerously unpredictable. A mistake in Bengal could become debilitating.

Moreover, two years later the government in Delhi will not look as cheerful as it looks now. Even the new faces will seem like old faces, and there are enough old faces to begin with. (Mrs Sonia Gandhi has reserved the really new faces for the next Congress government.) Since there is no magic wand in Delhi, the present regime will become vulnerable to mistakes, misjudgment, blunders and simple helplessness.

The left today is running with the hare and hunting with the hound; in two years, it could lose the teeth of the hound, and the popular underprivileged status of the hare. It is a trap that needs some careful monitoring.

There is nothing inevitable; but everything is possible. The desire to manage such contradictions is very strong in both the Congress and the left, glued as they are by a common anger against the BJP. Those predicting early disaster for the government, are only expressing what they want to see happen, rather than basing their assessment on any rational analysis of ground realities.

Power is not won easily, and therefore no one is willing to surrender it foolishly either. But politics is, in the end, not controlled by politicians; it is determined by the logic of power. The simple fact is that the principal allies at the centre are old and unrelenting antagonists in the states.

Since the assembly elections are, so to say, in an assembly line, there could be a domino effect, with the results of one shaping the contours of the next. If the Congress-alliance can win Maharashtra in September, it leads to one set of consequences. If it loses, then another dynamic takes over. And so on.

The cat that stole the cream of this general election is sitting with 21 seats in the Lok Sabha and a growing vote across the country, including Bengal, long a favoured target of the BSP. Mayawati had the largest number of candidates in this election, and has surprised the conventional parties with the extent of her base.

She may not be able to win assembly elections alone, but she could determine who wins and who loses. It would be a mistake to treat her like a pawn on the emerging chessboard; she has the powers of a queen. Whatever is produced on the assembly line will bear her stamp.

The writer is editor-in-chief of Asian Age, New Delhi.