By C. Uday Bhaskar, IANS
Pakistan’s long awaited tryst with truly participatory democracy has finally begun – but the challenges ahead are daunting.
President Pervez Musharraf has called for the convening of the newly elected National Assembly Monday (March 24) and the Zardari-led Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), the single largest party in the just elected legislature, has finally ended the suspense of who will be the interim prime minister of Pakistan. Former speaker Yusuf Raza Gillani has been nominated to head the government over the other three PPP contenders, Makhdoom Amin Fahim, Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar and Makhdoom Shah Mehmood Qureshi.
Earlier Wednesday, the democracy experiment in Pakistan scored a notable gender victory when Fehmida Mirza was elected the first ever woman speaker of the assembly. Her task will be to steer a nascent coalition of anti-Musharraf parties through a complex constitutional and political minefield even while the new government seeks to meet the aspirations and rising expectations of a vibrant electorate. The latter are reeling under a slew of deteriorating socio-economic conditions ranging from a steep rise in the price of essential commodities such as food and petrol to an alarming drop in power generation.
The socio-religious fabric within Pakistan, which has seen a steady increase in suicide bombing attacks and right-wing extremism, has now spread to Islamabad and Lahore – the very heart of the Pakistani state and the army establishment.
Thus the Gillani government which will soon be in the saddle will have to evolve appropriate short-term tactical approaches along with its new-found coalition partners, the Nawaz Sharif-led Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and the Awami National Party (ANP) from the Pakhtoon dominated NWFP.
The operative word here is ‘short-term’ – for the yet to be sworn in Gillani team knows that theirs will be an interim government. The leader of the PPP, Asif Zardari, the widower of the slain Benazir Bhutto, is the real PM in waiting and it is expected that in a few months he will be elected to the assembly and thereby become eligible to be the prime minister.
It may be recalled that Zardari had not planned to contest the elections since his wife Benazir was the undisputed face and leader of the PPP – but the tragedy that befell her and Pakistan in December last has led to the current sequence of events in the electoral history of Pakistan.
Perhaps it is history and culture that will determine the future course of the courageous Pakistani grapple with democracy, wherein the long pent-up aspirations of civil society as reflected in the Feb 18 elections will be pitted against the nine year Musharraf reign and the dominant impress of the Pakistani ‘fauj’ (armed forces).
To that extent, Asif Zardari and Nawaz Sharif, the real civilian power behind the Gillani façade, will have to shape their immediate domestic policies in such a manner that the post Musharraf transition is neither hijacked nor aborted by the astute president himself. Here the role of the army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, will be of great importance. Is the Pakistani Army, with its varied corporate interests and carefully nurtured self-serving constituencies within the Pakistan polity, now willing to cede the primacy it has appropriated unto itself from the Ayub Khan years?
The natural and deeply inhered anthropological instinct for self-preservation and the relentless compulsion of ulterior interest, both among individuals and institutions, would suggest that this shift of the power matrix within Pakistan would be deeply contested. Musharraf, Nawaz Sharif and Zardari are all markedly imbued with this trait and have used every skill and available card with rare panache in the course of their individual trajectories apropos apex power in the Pakistani context. The turbulent post-Jinnah national history of Pakistan and the opportunistic political culture it spawned wherein the army manipulated both Allah and America to create the intangible but corrosively effective triple A troika cannot be wished away by the fervour of the February elections – however desirable the exigency.
The weight of this contradictory inheritance may yet test the anti-Musharraf bonhomie that is so palpable in Pakistan at this moment. The PPP and the PML-N are uneasily bonded together, more by their mutual aversion to Musharraf than by any deep ideological commitment to the normative democratic principle – the Murree declaration notwithstanding.
During their years in office, Nawaz Sharif and the late Benazir Bhutto were beholden to the army for their continuation in office as PM and neither of them were paragons of virtue or rectitude.
Bitter rivals, the personal hostility between them will be a dark shadow that can weigh down the Zardari-Sharif coalition both at the centre and the Punjab province. And both leaders know that they are preparing for the next general election where they hope to obtain that elusive single-party majority in the National Assembly.
The PPP is further constrained by the marginalization of the Fahim faction and the less than universal appeal of Zardari as the true and legitimate inheritor of the Benazir Bhutto mantle. To his credit, the latter has splayed his cards prudently and has to carry the coalition with the PML-N and the ANP even while consolidating his position within the PPP to become the post Gillani PM.
Concurrently the demand of the lawyers to reinstate the former chief justice and his colleagues, a demand intensely supported by Nawaz Sharif, will also have to be balanced to avoid a full-blown constitutional and legislative crisis.
If this looks like an over-flowing cup for the new dispensation in Pakistan, the role of the external actor – a determinant that has always negatively impacted the fortunes of the Pakistani people – is yet to be factored in. Both the US and Saudi Arabia are potent elements in the orientation of any government in Islamabad and their ostensibly visible agenda and deeper objectives will add to the complexity of the challenges facing the Gillani government. Allah’s benediction, America’s sagacity and the army’s restraint will be sorely needed to ensure that Pakistan’s tryst with democracy is not in vain.
(C. Uday Bhaskar is a well-known strategic analyst. He can be reached at [email protected])