Our experience in democracy
By
Shamshad Ahmad
Ever since the emergence of the nation-state, the world has experienced many forms of political systems ranging from monarchies to republics; from aristocracies to oligarchies and from tyranny to democracy. The explanation and appraisal of democracy has been a favourite theme of ever-ongoing discussion since the earliest times of political speculation. After centuries of trial and error, democracy has emerged as the preferred choice. It is now considered universally applicable and is also the most prevalent model of government in our era.
The modern version of democracy is a representative system in which the problem is how to secure a system of voting that ensures the election of representatives who reflect as completely as possible the varieties of opinion of the electorate. The question of representation is thus the most fundamental problem of today’s democracy. “Pure” democracy, in which the politically qualified members of the community meet together for the discussion and decision of public questions, is universally regarded as suitable only for small communities with simple collective needs. It has never widely existed and has now generally disappeared, even from societies that claim to be democratic to their core.
There may be no ideal state but in his Social Contract, Rousseau had visualised his own ideal of a state with a democratic system in which the sovereign power rests with the people, for they alone are in possession of an inalienable ‘general will’. In his view, only a popularly elected government can implement the general will. Hegel, a 19th-century philosopher, glorified the state power beyond limits but also recognised people’s general will.
Government by ‘popular majorities’ means rule by the average man, who is generally less intelligent, controlled in his opinions and conduct more by emotion than by reason, of limited knowledge, lacking the means of leisure necessary for the acquisition of information, knowledge and understanding, and suspicious of any superior ability in others. What political virtue, it is asked, is there in mere superiority in numbers? Our own philosopher poet Allama Iqbal acknowledged this by saying that “democracy is a form of government in which heads are counted, not weighed.”
In practice, therefore, democracy is the most difficult and risky of all forms of government since it requires the widest spread of intelligence and education. In the words of a cynic, “you must not enthrone ignorance just because there is so much of it.” But all this notwithstanding, in today’s civilised world, there is no alternative to a democratic form of government. This, however, necessitates a state and methods of its governance to be based on a “social contract” to provide for the security and protection of its citizens and their property by utilising the whole force of the community.
No doubt, on their emergence as two independent states on the map of the world as a result of a democratic political process, both India and Pakistan inherited a parliamentary tradition and began their independent statehood with a democratic path clearly charted out for them. To start with, however, there was no level playing field for the state of Pakistan which had to build an entire government from the scratch in 1947 under a state of emergency whereas India was born with an intact bureaucratic apparatus in Delhi. In India, on the other hand, the Congress emerged after independence as virtually a mini-parliament, with habits of debate, argument and negotiation. India managed to forge a democratic constitution by 1950, and despite its huge size and socio-economic challenges, has been holding elections every five years.
In Pakistan, the vision of a democratic and progressive future was unambiguously articulated in a resolution adopted at the first meeting of the Council of the Pakistan Muslim League in December 1947, when it pledged “to work for an ideal democratic state based on social justice, as an upholder of human freedom and world peace, in which all citizens will enjoy equal rights and be free from fear, want and ignorance.” This vision, however, remains unfulfilled. With its founder’s early demise in September 1948, the new State of Pakistan lost the promise of healthy political growth with acute systemic deficiencies and frequent leadership miscarriages, restricting its transition to democracy.
After the Quaid, it was left without any sense of direction, and came to be possessed by a corrupt political hierarchy of no more than a bunch of self-serving, feudalist and opportunistic politicians who were to manage the newly independent Pakistan in collusion with civil and military bureaucracy. In the process, we saw a continuing cycle of governmental changes by non-political means. Machiavelli’s political philosophy based on the “doctrine of necessity,” became an integral part of our body politic. Democracy was never allowed to flourish in the country. Pakistan experienced frequent political breakdowns, long spells of military rule, institutional paralysis, endemic corruption, and general aversion to the rule of law.
Given the common history of the twin neighbours, one wonders why India is democratic and Pakistan is not. What after all is wrong with Pakistan? For us, it is not sufficient only to attribute Pakistan’s failure in democracy to its leadership miscarriages and military take-overs. There are in fact deep-rooted historical, socio-cultural and geo-political factors that have been conditioning the post-independence democratic tradition in Pakistan. Since independence, the politics and governments in Pakistan have also remained hostage to the elite classes which have been inimical to any political liberalisation in the country.
Historically, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the British had been gradually devolving power to local authorities in several provinces across India but those reforms were never extended to the North-West Frontier Province and Punjab, the territories that later made up the bulk of Pakistan after the 1947 partition. Thus several of the provinces India inherited from the Raj already had some experience in democracy, Pakistan inherited two highly militarised provinces with no such tradition. This unpalatable colonial legacy in conjunction with the country’s feudalised political parties, social conservatism, and outside influences provided a fertile ground for Pakistan’s army to grow in size and scale and gain an increasingly strong influence over the state.
The overbearing feudal power structure in Pakistan is also the cause of our political decay. It has always resisted land reforms in the country which it sees will strike at its own roots. Unlike India’s Congress Party, the Muslim League, Pakistan’s founding party was almost wholly dominated by a few feudal families, which the British had patronised before partition and were powerful enough to retain control over national affairs through the bureaucracy and the armed forces. Even after the Muslim League’s disintegration, the same feudalised oligarchy consisting of different men at different times under different political flags remained in power with or without military collaboration.
The most important factor circumscribing democracy’s growth in Pakistan has been its geopolitical location which not only shaped its personality as a state but also conditioned its domestic as well as external behaviour. In that intensely bipolar world, the young state of Pakistan, faced with the stark reality of its geo-political environment, gravitated naturally to the pole that it thought stood for freedom and democracy. The West, however, looked at Pakistan solely as a strategic asset in its “containment” policy against Soviet expansionism. The ensuing sequence of history speaks for itself in determining what really happened to democracy in Pakistan.
For us, the concepts of a good society and a good state or for that matter ‘good methods of government’ remain merely philosophical expressions with no practical relevance. With an ingrained culture of political opportunism and greed, we have yet to discover a theory of state and methods of government which will suit the genius of our nation.