Zardari’s pledge

MORE than six months have passed since the general election but no headway has been made towards restoring the 1973 Constitution to its original form. All parties are united on the need for doing away with the 17th amendment and stripping the president of the draconian powers he enjoys at the moment, including Article 58-2(b). One reason why, in spite of the consensus, this task has not been taken up in earnest is the unresolved judges issue. While the two major parties showed unity in managing to get rid of Pervez Musharraf, the continued split on the restoration of the judges seems to have distracted attention from the need for grappling with the question of presidential powers. In an article in an American newspaper Asif Ali Zardari pledged that as head of state he would support the prime minister and parliament in their efforts to trim the president’s powers. Coming from a man whose election as Pakistan’s next president is a certainty, his resolve deserves to be welcomed.

Article 58-2(b) has done enormous harm to Pakistan. First inserted into the Constitution by Ziaul Haq the clause helped the general sack Mohammad Khan Junejo, his own protégé, within three years of Junejo’s election as prime minister. Ghulam Ishaq Khan used the powers under this article twice to dismiss Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif. Benazir thought she was safe from the mischief of this article when she had a PPP man, Farooq Leghari, as president. But that did not prevent Leghari from dismissing a prime minister who enjoyed a majority in the national assembly. Nawaz Sharif did away with 58-2(b), but Musharraf had it restored. The clause lays down the caveat that the president will use it only when he is certain that the government is no longer functioning in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution. But Zia, Ishaq and Leghari used it for political reasons. The misuse of 58-2(b) led to four general elections in nine years, without giving the country political stability. There are other powers which also rightfully belong to the prime minister but which are now vested in the president. These powers include the appointment of Supreme and High Court judges and service chiefs. Once elected president Zardari must quit the party but it goes without saying that he will continue to influence the levers of the PPP’s policy-making apparatus. One hopes that once he is firmly in the saddle at the President House and his party overcomes the crisis in its relationship with the PML-N his commitment to make himself a titular head of state will not waver.

Right plans, wrong priorities

THE government has constituted two committees to recommend measures to cope with economic challenges under the five-year development plan and prepare a roadmap for human development. Earlier, in May, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani constituted an economic advisory council to formulate a reforms agenda and recommend policies to steer the country out of the current crisis. So now we have in all three committees, comprising a total of 39 members, mostly well-known economists, sociologists, businessmen, bankers, administrators, researchers, politicians and civil servants of proven ability. These committees between them comprise the best brains in the country in their respective fields. But if one went back to the inaugural days of every incoming government in this country over the last six decades one would find that without fail every one of them resorted to this practice only to consign these committees to inaction quickly and file their reports unseen. There must be hundreds of such reports gathering dust in government warehouses.

So, lest these new committees try to reinvent the wheel or waste time and the taxpayers’ money in repeating an exercise already done, it is important that they are first asked to go over the old reports, which contain significant contributions by many members of the three new committees. It is also important for these committees to keep in mind that we are past masters in preparing excellent socio-economic plans but utter failures when it comes to implementing these plans. Remember our second five-year plan that the South Koreans adopted and quickly left us at least three decades behind? The wide gap between the promises made in our plans and the reality on the ground actually reflects the divergence between the social premise on which the plans are built and the increasing demand on resources by a state obsessed with security. In order to escape this unfortunate legacy we must decide without further loss of time what we are: a security state or a social welfare state? Did Pakistan come into being to remain perpetually in a state of war or to better the socio-economic lot of Muslims of South Asia? If we continue to plan for a social welfare state but spend most of our resources in purchasing ever more sophisticated weapons we will for ever remain dependent on dole.


THE academic year of first-year students at Karachi’s government colleges has been shortened by no fault of the students. This is in contrast to not only the rest of Pakistan but the world where classes are held, on average, for over 200 days in an academic year. Even if the placement of students in the city’s 123 government colleges under the Centralised Admission Policy (CAP) is finalised by September 15, classes will not start before October 6. It takes a number of days after placement lists are issued for colleges to complete the admission process. Given the starting date and public holidays, the academic year is expected to be compressed to 130 days as against the desired 210 days. Why should the Karachi students suffer?

The slow, cumbersome process has been the undoing of the Karachi first-year students. Though the process began on Aug 5, submission of forms was delayed because most of the admission seekers received their matriculation transcripts late and could not submit their applications. How can the selection process begin in a timely manner when the results were not available on time? Furthermore, forms for the placement of candidates in government colleges were in short supply. Many citizens contacted newspaper offices to complain that several designated bank branches in various localities of the city were running short of forms. With the entire system marred by structural weaknesses delays have become inevitable. The slow-paced procedures need to be rectified if students are not to suffer because of inefficiency. As far as the admission procedure is concerned students generally rank their choice institutions in order of preference and submit their transcript to the government for evaluation. What should have been a fairly simple procedure has become the bane of the system. The lesson? If results are not issued promptly and forms are not made available in time, the process cannot be completed in a timely manner. A shortened academic year will leave students struggling to complete coursework, affecting the quality of education in the business hub of Pakistan. With the large number of holidays — scheduled and unscheduled — affecting the span of the academic year, one cannot take this matter lightly. Holidays must now be slashed to salvage the academic year.


URBANITES owe much to independent television. It has played a key role in informing and aiding political mobilisation. For those with little or no education, it has been a crash course in democracy.

Yet television pulls its punches over grassroots issues similar to the government’s ‘hands-off policy’ where feudal politicians rule the roost and where independent channels are still not allowed to penetrate. So all we’re left with is an attempted urban democracy, where the media gives labour some voice and visibility, but doesn’t quite advocate equal rights and representation.

The enforced silence of entire communities, villages and tribes on exploitation, inhumanity and violence — notwithstanding the independent media cacophony that does not reach the countryside — is shocking. It amounts to being the chilling silence of the lambs which constitutes the real picture of Pakistan’s society and polity. For the masses, little has changed. Pakistan has never been a democracy even in its several short-lived democratic experiments. In our context, democracy can only be defined as being exclusive to men and male priorities, with focus on the interests of the middle and upper classes.

In some societies, one of the unwritten qualifications of a worthy male political representative is both the status of the womenfolk in his family, and that of his employees, whether peasants, factory workers or household servants. It can be very revealing where double standards are the norms. A man may be publicly pious, even good to his wife and daughters, yet viciously maintain bonded labour in chains.

Rights are not confined to basic wages and utilities. They also demand just redistribution and allocation of resources so that everyone can have a minimum acceptable start in life, since a just society is not possible under local or national monopolies and cartels. The obvious now needs to be spelt out explicitly in the constitution. Too many politicians separate political rights from human rights as if the latter were optional luxuries under lofty UN conventions only to be given lip service.

Giving people a once-in-a-while chance to cast a vote does not in itself constitute democracy. It merely offers them a narrow, pre-selected choice over leadership. But they cannot determine how and to what degree that leadership will deliver equal rights to citizens. A problematic matter indeed given that absolute power corrupts absolutely!

The road for suffering citizens to their parliamentarians in search of relief is long and convoluted. Real priorities tend to get skewed or suppressed. People do not even get heard. The irony is that a feudal is assigned the task of representing the interests of landless peasants and smallholders; that major business or industrial interests claim to speak for labour which doesn’t even receive minimum wages and facilities to give him dignity; and that an over-generalised GDP and export earnings are made the criteria of a country’s ‘success’ rather than health, livelihood, education, nutrition and comfort of the masses.

The presence of women in parliament is often flaunted as major ‘progress’. It may be so for them personally, but what has it gained for women at large? Domestic violence is accepted as a norm, and women continue to be murdered to assuage dubious male ‘honour’, while politically-connected culprits manage to go scot-free even if some lesser mortals do not. Action is seen to be taken only when an incident gets inadvertently exposed. There are no pre-emptive steps. The police serve the powerful, not the people.

The Balochistan incident of shooting, then burying the victims alive (although refuted by the police) wasn’t the first case of extreme violence against women in this country. Violence against women could fill a gruesome bestseller on Pakistan’s shameful track record, including that of presenting scapegoats as culprits to face the death penalty or the hapless hit-man forced to kill under orders. Laws are subject to interpretations of convenience. Economic exploitation is not even questioned as undemocratic. Justice has to be purchased through the courts and lawyers through a process that dooms the poor who mostly are deemed guilty unless they can prove their innocence.

Any government, even the most inept, can make laws. But the best of paper laws are of no use to people without implementation in a timely manner, not after the victims have died.

The prime minister may have been chosen by the leading political party under the rules, but ultimately he has to be the prime minister of all citizens, not just of his party members and followers. He should therefore be non-partisan in the public interest. Mr Gilani has been as admirable as he has been likeable in that respect until recently when he undertook the unbecoming duty of canvassing for a presidential candidate. That compromised his neutrality as a prime minister of the people.

Even otherwise, long before the prime minister’s independence was nipped in the bud and reduced to a token, the party appeared to be reduced to a civilian dictatorship, already being reflected in governance. The takeover by a single person who has never been known to be a party man or even seen by the side of the late chairperson over the past seven years, and who as a consequence of his past opportunistic stint in government, creates only doubts about his credibility and reliability as president, raising serious misgivings for the future. There are means to unilaterally dump a prime minister but none to dispense with an unsatisfactory president.

By marginalising party members respected for their integrity and contribution, competition has been forcibly done away with — with, shockingly, no protest from fellow members. It begs the question: what was the price paid? This party badly needs to hold up a mirror and see itself the way the people view it — with disapproval. For the moment, the cat seems to have got the members’ tongues, as they echo everything sounded from the empty drum of the head honcho.

Again and again, Ms Bhutto’s history and role is held up as reason for immediate family members to take up the reins. But second-generation life-chairmanship and arbitrary co-chairmanship until an imposed head is of the required age and maturity, is not democratic; it is carefully crafted cultism. As such, expectations are nil from an expected-to-be president who avoids public debate on people’s issues, knowing he cannot knowledgeably or competently engage in public debate, and relying on a not-so-representative numbers’ game instead.

If all this spells little hope for the ordinary male citizen, there is none whatsoever for the women. Until civil society creates parties that represent the majority and exclude entrenched interests, nothing will change.


THE IRA’s ruling body, the army council, no longer has an army to command and control. British Northern Ireland secretary, Shaun Woodward, says that the IRA was dissolving after a politically sensitive report by the International Monitoring Commission, the organisation charged with overseeing the Provisionals’ (IRA) ceasefire.

The commission reported on Thursday that the IRA’s seven-man army council had fallen into “disuse,” but there would be no formal announcement of its being disbanded. Responding to the IMC’s 19th report, Woodward said: “I would go further and say this: is there an army for the army council to direct? It now seems according to this report there is not.”

Privately, the British and Irish governments accept the IRA cannot publicly announce its ruling body has been dissolved because it fears that its base would feel humiliated. Such a move would also leave it open to charges of selling out to unionists by dissident republicans.

In its latest report, the IMC said: “The mechanism which they [the IRA] have chosen to bring the armed conflict to a complete end has been the standing down of the structures which engaged in the armed campaign, and the conscious decision to fall into disuse.”

It added: “Now that that campaign is well and truly over, the army council by deliberate choice is no longer operational or functional.” The report’s authors also exonerated the IRA as an organisation from involvement in non-terrorist crimes, although it accepted some of its individual members or ex-members may be engaged in “ordinary” criminal activity.

Overall, the ceasefire monitoring commission said the IRA posed no threat to peace or the democratic process. It said it saw “no grounds” for believing that the IRA and its membership could return to “war”.

The Irish government emphasised the significance of the IMC’s conclusion that the IRA not only did not intend to return to war, but was also now incapable of doing so.

“This report demonstrates not only that PIRA (Provisional IRA)has gone away, but that it won’t be coming back. The IMC could not have been more unequivocal in its conclusion that the Provisional movement is now irreversibly locked into following the political path,” Dermot Ahern, Ireland’s justice minister, said.

The latest report is crucial, given the current pressures on the Northern Ireland power-sharing government.

— The Guardian, London


PARTY politics in this country has entered such an interesting phase that these parties have begun to pay greater attention to the squabbles in rival parties than to the rifts plaguing their own parties. The fact remains that almost all our political parties are afflicted with internal strife. It is, however, the UNP’s domestic friction that has currently attracted much public and media attention.

The rival parties and their media (appendages) while making all efforts to exaggerate the conflicts look for opportunities of enticing disgruntled members to their parties…. Although some parties attempt to hide their internal conflicts, it is not easy in the present context of advanced information technology that provides the country’s vibrant media with eyes and ears to pry into what goes on in any sphere of activity, periodic and cowardly attacks on them notwithstanding. Yet some parties with strict discipline succeed in preventing their conflicts [from] reaching the public glare.

The JVP, for instance, managed to project a façade of absolute unity for a long time until the departure of its propaganda secretary…. The JVP’s latest demonstration of its disciplinary control over its members also merits attention and commendation…. This indeed is a good example to be followed by all parties that expect good political conduct from members.The current UNP squabble … the much needed grist for the pro-government media mill … is often given full coverage.... Wednesday’s party deliberations were also given the usual treatment causing maximum damage to the party and its leader. However, this media treatment cannot be objected to when such deliberations are conducted in public with the media allowed to cover the event. As [the] media minister … pointed out … the media should be permitted to carry out its function of informing the public unhindered…. [T]he minister also stressed that nobody has the right to take the law into his or her hands even if media personnel act in violation of the law. The correct action … he pointed out, should be to seek the assistance of law enforcement authorities….

Comments being made on … conflicts by party activists show their impatience in placing their party in the seats of power. This impatience is understandable if the parties opposing the government have clear-cut alternative policies for solving the burning problems and taking the country forward to progress…. On the contrary there appears to be no major differences in party policies. Both sides, for instance, are for eliminating terrorism as a priority need and solving the national problem through a political formula.

The UNP now agitates for a general election. Are they really ready for such an election? What they must do first is to put their house in order and put their heads together in formulating a clear plan for resolving the national conflict if they are not prepared to go along with the APRC process. The urgent need today is for all parties to place the country above partisan interests as they often vow to do. — (Sept 5)