Who will own the system?
By Shahid Javed Burki
October 1st, 2012
There is, at this delicate moment in Pakistan’s history, a big question that must find an answer: who will own the new political order that is in the process of being shaped and how will that ownership be exercised? In the last few articles, I have been comparing Pakistan’s political development with that of India and will respond to this question first in the Indian context.
India is a more diverse country than Pakistan and yet, it has developed a consensus on how it should be governed. Its constitution, adopted in 1950, is based on two simple but powerful premises: that the will of the people must prevail and the rights of all communities must be fully protected. India can be justly proud of the fact that its head of government is a Sikh belonging to a religious community that once rebelled against the state and since then, has been fully accommodated in the political system. While it often deviates from these two rules, what is attractive about the Indian system is that it has the ability to return to the old established norms.
Today, the Indian system is faced with at least one big challenge: the slow death of national parties. The Congress has found it difficult to climb out of the dynastic mould. It is widely expected that the fourth generation in the Nehru-Gandhi family will take command of the party and the government when Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh pass from the scene. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is finding its ideological foundation to be a weak force for building a national base. The progressive failure of the national parties has created space for those with strong regional interests. The inevitable tension between the regional and national parties has made it very hard to formulate economic policies that are aimed at national rather than regional objectives. Prime Minister Manmoham Singh’s latest set of economic reforms has run into predictable regional opposition.
Whether New Delhi will persist with them will determine the future of the Indian political order.
Now let me turn to the case of Pakistan and the evolution of its political system. There are a number of contending forces in the country as well. Some of these don’t hesitate to use violence to get their way. Islamists and secularists have their views and are vying for influence, the former by using threats and intimidation to gain support. It was this group that assassinated Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer in January 2011 for expressing secularist views about the incarceration of a poor Christian woman on charges of blasphemy. Regional and separatist forces are fighting the weakened state, seeking to control the people who live in their territories and establish a claim on the resources that are yet to be exploited in these areas. Sectarianism is now a force with each faction within the same faith claiming to be in possession of the full truth. Religious minorities are being hounded to gain political ground. It is clear that the forces that seek to divide rather than unite will use whichever opportunity arises to get their way. It was not bad policing that produced mayhem in Pakistan following the airing of a YouTube video that disparaged the prophet of Islam in mid-September. A score of people died so that those who excited them could gain additional political ground.
Religion has become the battleground in Pakistan. In India, the failure of the BJP to use the Hindu identity to define national politics pushed religion to the background. That has not happened in Pakistan. A fully democratic order that respects the rule of law is the only way to bring together different forces and get them to resolve their differences through the ballot box and from the floors of the national and provincial assemblies. Once a law is placed on the books, there must not be any deviation from it, in particular by those who hold the reins of power. The law, for instance, does not permit any individual — certainly not a federal minister — to urge the murder of a person who may have hurt the sensitivities of those who follow his faith. This was precisely what was done by the minister in charge of railways when he announced a reward of $100,000 for the murder of the man behind the YouTube video.
Will Pakistan be able to reconcile the deep devotion to Islam as the faith of the country’s majority with the demands of a political order based on accommodating different views not only about religion but on other issues that lie in the domain of public policy?
Source: Who will own the system?