I don't necessarily subscribe to the views as mentioned in this article.


An Indian View: How Pakistani Liberals Thrashed Their Homeland


By S. SATHANANTHAN
Wednesday, 19 March 2008.



NEW DELHI, India—A few days after the February 2008 general elections, I met an acquaintance - an investment banker - in Karachi who looked ecstatic.


He bubbled, “these elections have been so cathartic for the entire nation".



With a pathetically low 30% turnout of voters, I puzzled how he concluded the “entire” nation had participated in the experience.

He is not alone in slurring over the damaging implications of the low voter turnout.



Almost all liberals - who include member of women's and human rights organizations, journalists, writers, lawyers and assorted professionals - are thrashing about to divine a “national mandate” in the election results. They have dodged the obvious question: Why did the majority of Pakistani voters ignore, perhaps even boycott, the elections? Instead the liberals trotted out self-serving claims that fear of violence and suicide bombings discouraged a large number of people.

About an hour after my encounter with the investment banker, my wife and I were on our way back home in a metro cab. As the car cruised down the new flyover that meets with Shahrah-i-Faisal we saw a couple of trucks over-flowing with agitated men, shouting slogans and waving flags.

We casually asked the driver what that was about; and words cascaded out of his mouth as if he had been waiting for the flimsiest excuse to unburden his misery. "Just wait and see all the politicos will come out of the woodwork to make our lives hell. We don't need any elections for 20 years, just a disciplined ruler. We are not made for elections, we
need the stick to keep us in line. And if after 20 years we still haven't learnt then I would say we hand the country over to America. What else can we do? But at least let's give it a try for 20 years."

He wanted to continue: "I am not a pro-Musharraf man but I have to say if he put ten per cent in his pocket he put ninety per cent into this country. We can see it all around. Never in my life had I seen the highways so safe - women drive on them at night".

I think the 70% of the country that didn't vote is like Attaullah, our taxi driver. They don't believe elections serve any useful purpose for good reasons. Elections have entrenched the status quo; they bestowed a democratic veneer to rule by feudal and tribal coteries whose nepotism and corruption is legendary, whilst the 70% remained mired in poverty.

For weeks and months liberals cried themselves hoarse demanding “free and fair” elections. They made dire predictions that pre-poll rigging had already begun and alleged darkly in private that President Pervez Musharraf has received expert advise on the subject from U.S. President George W. Bush's campaign staff, who deftly executed pre-poll rigging in Florida during the 2000 U.S. presidential election.


Their own exalted duty, asserted some liberals, is to minimize manipulations so that the 2008 general elections accurately reflect the will of the Pakistani people; but in fact they hoped the voters, muddled by the sympathy factor following the PPP leader Benazir Bhutto's assassination, would usher in a PPP government. But liberals also feared that, despite their strenuous efforts, President Musharraf and Pakistan Muslim League (PMLQ) would nevertheless rig the elections in their favor, as they were alleged to have done in 2002. Some liberals gleefully looked forward to again wielding the democracy stick against the President and the anticipated new PML(Q) government.

But Gen. Musharraf, in the capacity of Chief Executive, had delineated the next two stages in his road map to build the foundations of democracy. In the second stage he intended to hold the offices of both Chief of Army and President, which he did. In the final stage, he said he would doff the uniform and ensure free and fair general elections. He kept his word. And to the consternation of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and Muslim League-Nawaz (PMLN), he blocked their rigging ploys.



By all accounts, the 2008 general elections were more free and fair than those held by the two parties when they alternated in power during the 1990s.

Born-Again Democrats?


Having screamed for genuine elections, the liberals have to live with the results: namely, the return of PPP's Asif Zardari and PML(N)'s Nawaz Sharif, both of whom have controversial antecedents in Pakistani politics.

Almost seven years ago, columnist-turned-politician-turned-columnist-turned-politician again, Ayaz Amir, had posed the following rhetorical questions: “Does any newspaper-reading man in Pakistan doubt Benazir's and Asif's guilt? Does anyone think they got no commission from the Swiss firm, SGS-Cotecna? Does anyone doubt the financial acumen of the then ruling couple who turned Islamabad into an open auction mart where every deal, no matter how outrageous, was on offer provided the right palms were greased?”



Amir recalled, “the longstanding love affair between GHQ and the Sharifs (the Sharifs having been discovered and groomed for great things by General Zia himself, Lt-Gen Jillani, Lt-Gen Hamid Gul and a whole line of minor geniuses in ISI)...The Sharifs' notions of government were intensely private: which is to say, have your own man at every key post. They began with commissioners and police DIGs, the dregs of both services pandering to their whims and enriching themselves in the process ... In the person of Justice Qayyum at the Lahore High Court they had the closest thing they could get to a personal judge. Division of family assets, balancing of huge bank loans against dummy collateral, tightening the noose around Asif Zardari and Benazir: the
only judge who could handle these sensitive matters was Justice Qayyum”.

And Amir concluded: “The common factor between both parties is gangster-ism and corruption. Shahbaz Sharif resembled nothing so much as a Mafioso don. What does Asif Zardari look like? In any Godfather sequel he can easily get a part. As for moneymaking it is hard to figure out who beat whom: the PPP leadership or the Muslim League? My own guess is the Sharifs were professionals: subtle about their money. Zardari left a
trail, which goes all the way to Rockwood, French submarines, Amer Lodhi, and my favorite grand admiral, Mansur-ul-Haq." (Dawn, April 20, 2001).

Liberals have been baying for President Musharraf's resignation partly because he, as an army general, overthrew the democratically elected Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in October 1999.



But Rifaat Hamid Ghani documented the near universal welcome people had extended to Gen. Musharraf at that time:



“There is no doubt the ouster of Mr. Nawaz Sharif ... was welcomed, and the primary reason was the constitutional amendment Mr. Sharif was seeking (and which politicos like Mr. Kasuri and Syeda Abida Hussain had endorsed) that united civil and moral legislative and executive inquisitorial powers in the prime minister's office, in what was touted as the paradigm of a true Emir. The common Pakistani, as distinct from those gracing the treasury benches, had no truck with twisting religion into justifying totalitarianism. They could see the way elected parliament was leaning and the military takeover was a happy release from Mian Nawaz Sharif's emerging fascistic theocracy." (Dawn, Oct. 25, 2004).

Benazir had not been far behind. She donned the headscarf to placate Islamists; and her government provided funds and granted diplomatic recognition to the Afghan Taliban regime in 1995. During the run-up to the 2008 elections liberals wanted the Pakistani
people to believe that the same Zardari and Sharif are in effect the ‘farishtas’ who would lead the country to the promised democracy-land; that they could resurrect the pre-Emergency judiciary, set its independence in stone and force President Musharraf out of office.

But the PPP had politicized the judiciary in 1996 when Benazir appointed her favorite as Chief Justice ignoring more senior judges. Sharif's subsequent run-ins with judges do not instill confidence either.


“During his second stint in power with his a ‘massive mandate'," reminisced Ardesher Cowasjee, “Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif wished to rid himself of an awkward Chief Justice of Pakistan, Sajjad Ali Shah. So he consulted his confidantes. On November 5, 1997, as recounts Gohar Ayub Khan in his recently published book, Glimpses into the Corridors of Power, Nawaz “asked me to accompany him to the PM's House. In the car, the PM put his hand on my knee and said, “Gohar Sahib, show me the way to arrest the Chief Justice and keep him in jail for a night”.



Naturally, Gohar was “shocked” and advised him against even thinking about it. But deep-thinking Nawaz thought further, and on November 27, 1997, he had his goons
physically storm the building of the Supreme Court of Pakistan while Sajjad Ali Shah
was hearing a contempt case brought against him (Nawaz) and then proceeded to engineer, with the help of Sajjad's brother judges, the successful removal of their Chief Justice." (Dawn, Aug. 5, 1997).

As Masud Mufti noted, “The parties do not have an effective or long term commitment to democracy, an independent judiciary, merit and public welfare ... [they offered] lukewarm support to the lawyers' movement for the restoration of Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry and other judges.” (Dawn, Mar. 10, 2008).



The track record of PPP and PML(N) are grotesquely undemocratic; and they have blocked and will continue to block an independent judiciary that could challenge their authoritarian excesses.

To cover up their ill-advised opposition to President Musharraf, after the elections liberals are desperately wriggling to reinvent Zardari and Sharif as ‘democrats’.



Ayesha Siddiqa enthusiastically dubbed the polity a “democracy in transition.” (Dawn, Feb. 28, 2008), presumably under the elected leaders Zardari and Sharif, together with Awami National Party (ANP)'s Asfandyar Wali Khan and lesser figures, if at all they form a coalition government.



Self-aggrandized, another analyst and former foreign secretary, Tanvir Ahmad Khan: “Let there be no mistake. We are resurrecting a state that all but perished” (Dawn, Mar. 1, 2008).



“The importance of Mr. Zardari,” gushed S.A. Qureshi, “will be determined by his success in spelling out a charismatic vision for each geographical area [of the country] and how he intends to deliver it.” (Dawn, Feb. 27, 2008).



Worse still, in their haste to lay claim to the curative effects of democracy, Pakistani liberals distorted the victory of the ANP in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP); they made the outlandish contention that the defeat of the alliance of religious parties, the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA), proved once again that the vast majority of voters reject Islamists.



But extremists are not exclusive to religious parties. In fact they are very much in control of mainstream PPP and PML(N) and, as we saw above, are far more skilled in promoting Islamisation than the flatfooted Islamists in religious parties.



What the NWFP election results in fact show is that local Pukhtun nationalism over-rode general Islamic identity, a development with important parallels to the primacy of
Bengali nationalism in the former East Pakistan. The hapless liberals have yet to discover this.

The fact of the matter is that liberals may reinvent till they are blue in the face but neither Zardari nor Sharif would ever become the stuff of democracy. When confronted with this reality, they fall back on what is now the post-election ‘wisdom’: holding regular elections, claim liberals, is the indispensable learning process leading to a democratic polity. This assertion raises a host of questions.

On Ballot-Box Democracy

Are elections society-neutral? That is, do they have the same or similar outcomes irrespective of the history, culture and class structure of diverse societies?



Even a cursory survey of countries would show this is untrue. What is true is that elections - ballot-box democracy - legitimize and entrench the status quo, which is particularly problematical in pre-modern (feudal, semi-feudal and tribal) and authoritarian societies.

Many Pakistani liberals routinely point to India as evidence of how people by participating in regular elections, uninterrupted by military rule, schooled themselves in democracy.



This utterly absurd parallel ignores the dominance of the modern entrepreneurial class, which is buttressed by a burgeoning middle class that inherited the crucial lesson of the anti-colonial freedom struggle: namely, that rights are never given; they are always taken.



The third condition is that no single ethnic group dominates the state and armed forces.



The single largest group, the Hindi-speaking people, is not more than 35 per cent of the population in the most optimistic assessment; in effect every ethnic group and nationality is a minority. So the Hindi belt learned the hard way it cannot ride roughshod over other peoples and ethnicities (after early bruising attempts at Hindi hegemony, spearheaded by using Hindi as official language, failed in the 1950s); in the process the major non-Hindi
peoples and nationalities carved out the political space to reform the post-colonial state; and the process continues today. The modern class structure, historical experience of struggle, weak ethnic hegemony and a reformed post-colonial state constitute the foundation of the culture of democracy that has taken root in India; these conditions have no parallel in Pakistan.

The appropriate comparison is with Sri Lanka, which is a living proof that ballot-box democracy, in the absence of modernist pre-conditions, would in all likelihood deliver the opposite of genuine democracy.


Regular, largely free and fair elections have been held in that country for more than a century (beginning in 1933) and incumbent parties have been regularly put out of office. The military never took power. The population has a very high literacy level (92%). But the dominant class almost exclusively from the Sinhala ethnic group is a semi-feudal oligarchy steeped in pre-modern pageantry.



The historical experience of ‘peaceful’ transfer of power from the British to Sri Lankans in 1948 was devoid of the lessons of struggles for political rights. And the Sinhala ethnic
group is a dominant 70 per cent of the population and controls the state and armed forces. So it confidently rejects reforms of the centralized, unitary post-colonial state that are essential to accommodate the democratic aspirations of other peoples in the island. All four factors combined to smother prospects, if any, for the development of a culture of democracy, the absence of which is the main reason for the growth of armed resistance by Sinhalese working classes (1971). Tamils (1976) and, more recently, by Muslims (1989).



Not surprisingly the unreformed post-colonial state has, under guise of fighting "terrorism", transmuted into a military-bureaucratic authoritarian state. Sri Lanka's
pre-modern class structure, the paucity of anti-colonial struggles, ethnic hegemony and the unreformed post-colonial state have strong parallels in Pakistan.

From its birth, Pakistan has been under either bureaucratic-authoritarian or military-authoritarian regimes. The elected assemblies serve as the institutional interface between the regimes and the people and are dominated by feudal and tribal leaders and notables, who indulged in the charade of ballot-box democracy while collaborating with successive
regimes to legitimize their exercise of political power and to feather their own nests.



For historical and cultural reasons the Pakistani people did not inherit the lessons of anti-colonial struggles in British India. The 65 per cent strong Punjabi ethnic group controls the state and the armed forces to the detriment of the democratic rights of other ethnic groups. To consolidate its power, the Punjabi ethnic group retained the centralized post-colonial state virtually unchanged and further concentrated power in Islamabad.



As in Sri Lanka, in Pakistan too the culture of democracy is non-existent not despite ballot-box democracy but in many ways because of it.

Perhaps the Pakistani liberals' most glaring duplicity is their willingness to mislead the people of Pakistan into believing that the country has a political party system on which foundation a free and fair election-based democracy could be built. The cruel reality is that so-called political parties are feudal outfits that autocratic feudal/tribal rulers
control with an iron fist and, therefore, cannot deliver the democracy dividend.



In a refreshing break from the liberals' shibboleth, Kunwar Idris made forthright observations after the 2008 elections about the acutely undemocratic rule of succession by inheritance in the major parties:



"The mantle of the PPP's leadership has fallen on Benazir's widower Asif Zardari till their son Bilawal Bhutto Zardari...comes of age. Sibling Shahbaz Sharif will head the Muslim League's parliamentary group until Nawaz Sharif is constitutionally eligible to become prime minister for a third term. Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi is succeeding his aging cousin and brother-in-law, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, as the president of his faction of the Muslim League while their sons Wajahat Hussain and Munis Elahi wait in the wings. The leadership of Wali Khan's ANP and Samad Achakzai's MAP has also been inherited by their sons. Amir Haider Hoti, who has been nominated to become the chief minister of NWFP, is also a youth of Wali Khan's family.



Religious parties, with the rare exception of the Jamaat-i-Islami, are similarly mired in feudal inheritance practices. Members of the councils or caucuses of parties who ought to
promote inner-party democracy "have hardly ever shown any inclination to elect their leaders for they themselves are nominated by the party bosses and not elected by the general body of members.”

In short, "the difference between a prime minister and a military ruler is one of origin and not of values or accountability.”



Idris concludes: “The parties which are not democratically organized, quite obviously, are neither qualified nor inclined to establish democracy in the country. They cannot safeguard the fundamental rights of the citizens ... when their own members do not have them.” (Dawn, Mar. 9, 2008).


Adds Masud Mufti: “More than a 100 political parties still follow the same dictatorial patterns that revolve around a single person, or family. Their epicenter is active in dubious deals with the establishment to the complete exclusion of other members.” (Dawn, Mar. 10, 2008).

But liberals and particularly human rights and civil liberties activists effectively whitewashed the feudal monoliths as democratic political institutions. None of the liberals, either individually or through their organizations, has campaigned to expose the anti-democratic dinosaurs that the political parties actually are.



Indeed there was not a whimper of protest from liberals, including the much-touted legal
fraternity, against the autocratic rule and succession by inheritance within the parties. Instead they have championed the parties as hallowed vehicles of democracy and betrayed the people's fundamental rights, largely because liberals themselves are rooted in the same feudal/tribal social milieu. President Musharraf's political modernization project threatens their archaic world. Not surprisingly they exploited his unwise confrontation with the judiciary to undermine his authority and thereby discredit his vision for a far-reaching structural change.

Towards Structural Change

The core issue of democracy in Pakistan is structural change, which, in the context of politics, are always both cause and consequence of power struggles, both internal and external power struggles. Power struggles throw up losers and winners; and losers often grow into implacable enemies; and President Musharraf earned many of them.

Islamists were quick to label Gen. Musharraf an American puppet dancing to orders from the Bush administration. The immediate reason was that he torpedoed the alliance between Sharif and the minority Islamist faction in the armed forces. Further reasons are that he banned extremist organizations between 1999 and 2001 and launched the war against Jihadis.



The liberals, pathetically oblivious to this decisive power struggle in the country's history, joined the Islamists' chorus to pillory Gen. Musharraf as an unelected leader. It reached a crescendo post-9/11; they bereted him as an American stooge when he withdrew Pakistan's support for the Afghan Taliban regime.


Almost simultaneously Gen. Musharraf, backed by the modernist majority faction, moved against Islamists within civil society who challenged the army. These are armed, battle-hardened Pakistani Jihadis who returned from Afghanistan flushed with victory over the Red Army and obsessed with repeating the success against the Pakistani army and ushering in an Islamic revolution in the country. A few benchmarks of that power
struggle are the assassination attempts against President Musharraf, Waziristan Operation and siege of the Red Mosque; and suicide bombers; and the power struggle is continuing it to this day. Liberals, not known for a grasp of the dynamics of power, faulted President Musharraf for not dealing with Jihadis early on and, when he did take action, spun around to blame him for human rights violations!

President Musharraf also attempted several other structural changes between 2000 and 2007. He proposed an amendment to blasphemy laws but without success. His attempt to remove the undemocratic religion column in passports similarly fell foul of the religious establishment. He succeeded to push through legislation to protect women's rights. He
also eviscerated the dreaded district-level nexus between the police, bureaucracy and feudals in the inherited colonial administrative structure - which democratically elected previous leaders had left untouched – by introducing for the first time representative, elected local government institutions (Unions and Nazims) that transferred a modicum of political power to the poor and may well evolve into competing centers of people's power.



This earned him the undying hatred of the feudal and religious forces, which intensified further when he abolished the moribund religious apartheid by ending the system of separate electorates for religious minorities. As part of educational reforms, he ordered school history textbooks be rewritten to remove mindless extremist and anti-Indian propaganda inserted during Gen. Zia-ul-Haq's rule. Indeed, by all accounts President Musharraf's path-breaking initiatives have improved bilateral relations with India.

Over the years, President Musharraf's reforms have thrown up numerous enemies from the feudal, patriarchal and religious vested interests and anti-Indian lobbies. They can be found in the PPP and PML(N), in religious parties and civil society institutions – especially professionals' associations - and in the most conservative of occupations, the legal profession.

The New Great Game

President Musharraf made enemies outside Pakistan too. He faced a major challenge in 2003 when the U.S. invaded Iraq. Washington intensely pressured Islamabad to join the laughable "Coalition of the Willing".


The U.S. bribed (loan write-offs) or coerced (aid cut-offs) most countries in that decrepit "Coalition" It is to the eternal credit of President Musharraf that he nimbly sidestepped American demands. For instance, at one stage he agreed to send troops under the umbrella of the OIC.


Politically naïve liberals promptly moaned that President Musharraf was caving into U.S. pressure. But he calculated that diverse ideological stances of Muslim counties would not allow them to initiate such joint action and therefore Pakistan's participation cannot arise, which proved correct.

Meanwhile Benazir, living in self-imposed exile, was busy convincing Washington and London that if she had been the Prime Minister, Pakistan would have naturally joined the "Coalition". Inevitably Washington took a jaundiced view of President Musharraf's determination to strike an independent furrow while, of course, making positive public
pronouncements about his role as "ally" in the War Against Terror.

In contrast, President Musharraf prioritized Pakistan's national interests when steering the ship of state through the choppy waters of the emerging New Great Game. His foreign policy decisions over time convinced Washington that under his leadership, Pakistan would not side with the U.S. and Britain in the unfolding New Great Game to contain Russian and Chinese influence in Central and West Asia.



First, he refused to isolate Iran. Second, he pursued the Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline
in the face of stiff American opposition. President Musharraf further angered Americans be deepening Pakistan-China bilateral relations, offering Beijing naval facilities at Gwadar and extending nuclear cooperation.


Perhaps the last straw was his success in gaining Observer Status for Pakistan in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). Russia and China are spearheading the SCO, which includes four other countries: Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan; Iran and India are also Observers. The SCO is widely perceived as a rising eastern
counterweight to western security and economic groupings.

To rub salt into the wounds, President Musharraf refused permission for western intelligence agencies to interrogate Dr AQ Khan and firmly rejected Washington's repeated demands that U.S. troops should be allowed into Pakistan to hunt down Osama bin Laden and his Taliban associates.

But Anglo-Americans were not in a position to overthrow President Musharraf. Instead of a "regime change", they sought a "regime adjustment" in which he continues as President but is weakened sufficiently to serve their interests in the region. That is the logic underlying the two major demands of their sustained pro-democracy campaign. The first demand was that President Musharraf must doff his uniform; that would remove
his power base in the army. The second, that he should hold free and fair elections expected to sweep away his political power base, the PML(Q).

Washington and London couched their neo-imperialist demands in tear-jerking rhetoric about the welfare of the people of Pakistan. Anyone who believes that shibboleth should have his or her head thoroughly examined. For them, Pakistan is nothing more than a pawn in the New Great Game and Americans are looking for nothing less than a pliable regime in Islamabad with great urgency, given the debacles they face in Iraq and
Afghanistan.



As Harish Khare perceptively observed, “The Americans would want to enlarge their military presence in Pakistan. After all, it does not require any great diplomatic expertise to understand that the American carping over the 'free and fair' election in Pakistan is part
of Washington's strategic design: the Musharraf regime must be kept on its toes, it should be continuously badgered into feeling that its legitimacy ultimately depends on American certificates of good conduct, and, having been rendered so vulnerable, it should be pressured into letting the American/NATO forces have the run of the Pakistan-Afghan border in pursuit of the Taliban militants.” (The Hindu, Feb. 14, 2008).

Pakistan's deracinated liberals - a ghastly hangover from the colonial past - willingly weighed in on the side of Anglo-Americans and operated primarily through human rights and civil liberties organizations and the English-language media. Nudged by U.S. and British diplomats, and not forgetful of western sources of funds and frills, before the 2008
elections liberals obediently harassed President Musharraf about his legitimacy and mindlessly cheered Benazir as the dyed-in-the-wool patriot and democrat. Blissfully ignorant of the unfolding realpolitik, journalists wrote reams on everything that's wrong in the country under the President. A human rights activist, Asma Jahangir, emailed "friends of Pakistan" worldwide ostensibly to pressure U.S. not to support President
Musharraf but in fact to rally them against the President. Lawyers, led by Aitzaz Ahsan, repeatedly implored America to help re-establish the rule of law. Another activist, Hina Jilani, materialized opposite the doorstep - 10 Downing Street - of the erstwhile colonial ruler begging for "justice". Not to be outdone, Imran Khan and his former British
wife Jemima joined the neo-colonial flotsam and jetsam in London.

The celebrated liberal Benazir, ever willing to serve Anglo-American interests, obligingly let it be known that if she were Prime Minister she would allow U.S. intelligence agencies access to Dr A.Q. Khan (Dawn, Sept. 26, 2007) and invite U.S. troops into Pakistan to hunt Osama bin Laden.


In short, she willingly prostrated herself as America's doormat; and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared that she couldn't see democracy in Pakistan without Benazir. So the Bush administration arm-twisted President Musharraf to grant her an amnesty against all charges and allow her to re-enter Pakistani politics.

Washington's intentions were quite transparent. President Musharraf, weakened with the help from liberals, should remain at his post to prosecute the War on Terror and to keep the unruly politicians in line, with a little help from the army. Benazir was to take over as Prime Minister with control over foreign policy and prostitute Pakistan as the Anglo-American camp’s ‘cat’s paw’ in the New Great Game.

By assassinating Benazir, the Al Qaeda threw into disarray the Bush administration’s designs to bring Pakistan to heel. Zardari has reiterated PPP's support for the U.S. After the 2008 elections, Anglo-American diplomats in Islamabad are feverishly working to cobble together a puppet coalition government led by PPP and PML(N) as a counter weight to President Musharraf.

What Next?

My wife and filmmaker Sabiha Sumar ran into activists who had virulently demanded President Musharraf must reinstate the pre-Emergency judges.


Sabiha: So will PPP reinstate the judges?

Woman: That's just the point. Now they are saying that they won't.

Sabiha: Sounds a bit like the Hudood Ordinances.

Woman: Well that was different. Because they didn't have a two-third
majority in Parliament.

Sabiha: And they still have that excuse.

Woman: But you see Nawaz Sharif is saying that he will reinstate the judges. So they [PPP] should agree with that.

Sabiha: So why don't they?

Woman: That's the thing!

Sabiha: So I would rather go with the one who has done something like bring women into Parliament, make the Hudood Ordinance ineffective....



Woman 1 and 2 in chorus: Then why didn't he do more?!

Woman: He could have done everything but he didn't. You know political parties don't have so much power. They have to be careful. But this man had all the powers then why didn't he just kill the jihadis.

Woman's husband: And the thing is that they actually like him in India. [Editor’s note: Visit the campuses of Chinese universities. Pakistan’s Musharraf is hero to young Chinese women and men.]


In Pakistan today liberals should be relieved that President Musharraf held free and fair elections. But they are not. The election results have forced liberals to confront their monumental folly of helping to elect despotic and corrupt rulers. So they are turning around and biting the President's leg, blaming him for not being a full-blooded dictator. President Musharraf is damned if he does and damned if he doesn't.




Also, the warriors of democracy are faltering. Liberals are losing enthusiasm for re-instating that pillar of democracy - the judiciary - since the Bush administration has signaled its opposition. The PPP too is waffling on the issue. Speaking to the press, “Zardari parried several questions on issues like reinstatement of deposed judges ... the PPP leader said that the matters would be decided by parliament.” (Dawn,
Feb. 20, 2008).



For the same reason, liberals' hysterical cries for the President's resignation have subsided.



Thus lamented Ahmad Faruqui: “Sadly, many Pakistani political leaders and even some analysts have begun to argue that judicial restoration is not in the country's interest.” (Dawn, Mar. 10, 2008).




And Zardari is backing the U.S. position and Sharif has also fallen in line. So, in their Mar. 9 Murree Summit Declaration they skillfully passed the buck on reinstating the judiciary to the National Assembly: “The restoration of deposed judges as on November 2, 2007, shall be brought about through a parliamentary resolution to be passed in the
National Assembly within 30 days of the formation of the federal government.” (Dawn, Mr. 10, 2008).



Even a cursory knowledge of fratricidal Pakistani politics will show that the resolution will not see the light of day. In other words, reinstatement has been shelved as per instructions from the U.S. embassy. (Flat-footed analysts predictably missed the obvious sleight of hand and gloated the Declaration is a serious set back to President Musharraf.).

The backsliding continues. While addressing the Sindh High Court Bar Association, Aitzaz Ahsan glibly abandoned the demand for justice for victims of the Karachi bloodbath: “I have forgotten the May 12 mayhem,” he advised the lawyers, “and would like to request that it is better for all of us to forget that tragic incident.” (Dawn, Mar. 6, 2008).



Is that pragmatic accommodation? If so, with whom? And, for what rewards? Will the ‘liberals’ once again look to the army to rescue the country?



The author read for the PhD degree at the University of Cambridge and was Visiting Research Scholar at the Jawaharlal Nehru University School of International Studies. He is the co-writer and co-director of "Dinner with the President: a nation's journey". He cane be reached at ssathananthan@gmail.com