A NEW prime minister usually means the arrival of some freshness to the political scene, freshness of outlook if not of policy. Even if he/she is the dullest figure imaginable, there is yet some hope that some things will be done differently.
The hopes may prove unfounded, as they usually are — for remember the French saying (or is it a curse?) that the more things change, the more they remain the same — but there is a honeymoon period in which hope gets the better of experience and optimism radiates its warmth unchecked.
Consider the plight of the Pakistani people then for whom the coming of a new prime minister, Shaukat Aziz, means not the arrival of a new dawn but a regression to a political system that was in place almost 30 years ago when another military man, Field Marshal Ayub Khan — who had gifted this title to himself for no known battlefield exploit — was ruler of Pakistan.
In outward form Ayub’s system was different — the franchise was limited, ministers were chosen from outside the assemblies and there was no prime minister — but in essence it was the same: a military supremo the source of all power, a constitution tailored to his exact needs, and a team of technocrats spreading word of an incipient economic and social miracle.
General Musharraf took over the hulk of the 1973 constitution and made changes in it to suit his needs. His political ideology, to the extent that any is discernible, smacks of the same paternalism that marked Ayub Khan’s rule, centred on the belief that politicians are unreliable and corrupt, therefore not to be trusted with anything important, the army was a nation-building institution, and Pakistani conditions were such as to require a strong hand on the tiller.
The Pakistan army has thrown up two kinds of senior officers: ‘liberals’ in the Ayub Khan mould — Ayub having no patience with the clerical crowd, which was one of the good things about him — and religious diehards like General Zia. Gen Musharraf resembles Ayub, not Zia, in this respect.
The source of Ayub’s power was the president’s office behind which stood the army and the bureaucracy, the Civil Service being very powerful in his time. The National Assembly was mere democratic window-spreading, even more of a showpiece than the National Assembly of today. But, it must be said, that although the parliamentary opposition was minuscule, the quality of speech-making and debate back then was far higher. Ayub had a political party of convenience, the Convention Muslim League, just as, for some more political window-dressing, Musharraf has his Quaid-i-Azam Muslim League (the more things change...you can say that again).
The Ayubian system had no prime minister. But for all the power or relevance that the prime minister’s office commands in Musharraf’s set-up, it makes little difference whether there is a prime minister or not.
Hosni Mubarak has been Egyptian president since 1981. During this time Egypt has had seven prime ministers. The whole world knows Hosni Mubarak. How many people can name a single prime minister under him?
Some time after taking over, Ayub was confident enough to appoint an army c-in-c, General Musa Khan. But, to all appearances, Musharraf is not comfortable with the idea of relinquishing his army position, the source of his power, just as Zia was averse to this idea throughout his eleven and a half years (a Pakistani record) at the helm.
This underlines a key difference between these two periods. Ayub felt secure probably because those were more innocent times. The 1965 war hadn’t happened. When it did, it derailed many of Ayub’s economic accomplishments and, indeed, shook the country to its foundations, although this realization was a bit slow in coming. The agitation which forced him to quit office was yet to come and, most important of all, Bangladesh had not happened.
The army had fewer generals and those who were around commanded countrywide name-recognition. A far cry from today when it requires a computer to keep track of all general rank officers. Indeed, the army was not the behemoth it is today when the primary purpose of national activity seems to be to sustain this army.
A prime minister had been shot, and this was Liaquat Ali Khan in 1951. Although there has been no end to the whispers suggesting a powerful conspiracy behind his murder, it could be put down to the action of a demented individual as no one ever got to the bottom of that crime, which indeed could be an aspect of the conspiracy. But there was calculation and no little malevolence behind the hanging of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and it was this act, more than anything else, which spelled the end of Pakistan’s age of political innocence.
Perhaps as a consequence of this, army chieftains becoming would-be nation builders no longer feel as secure as Ayub Khan when he made Musa his army chief. The old story of the tiger’s back: difficult to get off.
But even if this era resembles that bygone one, is the analogy at all significant? Does it matter? It does if we care to believe, as many of us do, that those who forget the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them. Quite apart from the fact that Ayub’s long stay at the top (eleven years) gave rise to a sense of alienation in East Pakistan, his one-man rule was so restrictive and suffocating in nature, that when discontent came to a head towards the end of 1968, it swept all before it and the regime, which had looked so stable and strong, collapsed like a house of cards. The Convention League disappeared from the scene so quickly that even its detractors, never mind sympathizers, were left speechless. While no one mourned the demise of the 1962 constitution, there was no shortage of people who were struck by the irony of it all: an eleven-year journey beginning with martial law and ending in another martial law.
By concentrating power in his person, tailoring the constitution to his needs, making the political field restrictive, and not allowing the political system to grow as it should, Gen Musharraf is repeating the mistakes of that doomed decade.
Elections to the National Assembly and the provincial assemblies in 1965 — that is, on the heels of Ayub Khan’s dubious victory against Fatima Jinnah the previous year — had as much suspense to them as Shaukat Aziz’s by-election triumphs in Attock and Tharparkar. If things continue like this, and Musharraf’s American alliance endures — there being little to indicate that it won’t — the local elections next year and general elections two years later look set to be along the same lines. This is akin to putting the nation to sleep, which is what happened under Ayub, leading to a rising sense of bitterness and frustration.
The Hosni Mubarak model in Egypt or the now-vanished Suharto model in Indonesia, going on and on forever. Anything can happen in Pakistan and things can go wrong, but this at least is the calculation: power centred in a paternalistic presidency and the political system, whatever its details, subordinated to it and acting on its commands.
Gen Musharraf may mean well but his actions and policies — the ultimate measure of political achievement — point to a road the nation has travelled before.