democracyends
Titles can be deceptive. This column, for instance, is not about the popular British sitcom. It is about this country’s politics. I know some of you may protest that politics is not a male monopoly. If you do, please consider this. The last woman who rose to the top in Pakistani politics was assassinated in broad daylight only a couple of years ago. It is a male chauvinist society and for a change let us criticise men abandoning our favourite sport: Meera and other women hunting.

After the assassination of Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto, our political culture is quickly regaining its patriarchal trappings. Mohtarma and Nawabzada Nasrullah were the primary architects of the Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy (ARD) that finally culminated into the Charter of Democracy (CoD). It has taken only two years of her absence for the CoD to become perfectly irrelevant. The CoD has two sections, normative and prudential. It is clear that the normative/constitutional part will take some time to materialise as the codification of law if rushed can have umpteen unintended consequences. But the practical/cultural part should have been translated into action by now. Has it? Of course not.

There is no use blaming only one party for it. While the PML-N has not left any stone unturned to weaken the federal government, albeit vowing to do exactly the opposite, the PPP-led government has also paid back more than in kind. It is as if Murphy’s Law could not be more relevant for a country like Pakistan. Murphy’s Law states: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”

It surely does sound overly pessimistic and perhaps another pearl of wisdom from our dear prophet of doom Shaikh Rasheed Ahmed. Yet in order to avoid such a certain debacle the two political sides should have done more homework. Have they? I think not.

No matter what is said, the struggle for power in Pakistan has always proven easier than the exercise of power itself. Most of our political parties take over at the wrong moment, without much preparation. And since they are hardly prepared for both long term policy decisions and the careful handling of the immediate issues without losing the bigger picture, they inevitably give in to the impression that everyone cherishes a desire to oust them through a conspiracy. As time goes by this misperception transforms into a full-blown paranoia and proves the undoing of the democratic dispensation.

On the eve of the 2008 elections, of course before she was so brutally murdered, Benazir Bhutto remained perhaps the only politician who knew what she wanted to do in power. Her posthumous work Reconciliation and uncountable policy statements are brimming with the probable political choices she would have made while in power. Not only was she clearheaded but she was also gifted in winning the trust of the otherwise thicker ones in politics like the PML-N leadership. The rest of the politicians, it is sadly noted, were given to simplistic, often unrealistic, slogans rather than any elaborate game plans. While today her sacrifice gives mileage even to the political groups sworn to hate her, her wisdom is lost on us. Every man in power here has quite effectually managed to make a prat of himself.

As we have mentioned Murphy’s Law, another unconventional law deserves a mention here — the Law of Unintended Consequences. Every action has its consequences but this law states that any purposeful action will produce some unintended, unanticipated, and usually unwanted consequences and this unintended side-effect can be more significant than the intended effect. Pakistan’s current crisis would have been a textbook case for this law if policies in the Islamic republic were ever framed for any intended purpose. Our politicians make so many contradictory promises before assuming power that every step they take in fulfilling one promise manages to contradict a host of others. Take the PPP for instance. Immediately after the 2008 elections, while it was making promises to restore the deposed judges and to form the government with its ARD allies, it was also engaged in ensuring that a peaceful transition to civilian rule would take place without any radical anti-status quo steps. The latter desire won, the PPP was accused of reneging on its promise, and the PML-N cashed in through agitation: a clear breach of the CoD’s prudential commitments that our media philosophers care to ignore.

It must also not be forgotten that the political landscape has changed beyond recognition. Our power elite does not comprise merely of politicians and generals today. Au contraire, today we also have power anchors, power judges and power lawyers. Can you for instance ignore the “intellectual” who after having been dismissed from the post of the national broadcaster’s chairmanship is running a weekly countdown in his talk shows for the dismissal of the current government? These are the unintended consequences of Musharraf’s often mindless antics and semantics in power.

But the law of unintended consequences does promise us something more than only this. While bickering among themselves, these men in power do not quite understand what is at stake. Most of them are labouring under the delusion that if the current set-up goes they may come into power, through elections, another coup, a judgement or some other systemic anomaly. No one realises that this may not happen at all. If truth be told, all of them were one party during the Musharraf regime whereas the other party was that of Musharraf’s supporters, who maintained that democracy was ill suited for Pakistan. Today in case of the demise of the current set-up I foresee a possible reversal in time. While the odds of Musharraf’s return to power might be next to nil, his former supporters, with the perception that he had quite the right ideas, may not be totally irrelevant today. While he may never return to power, a change may come that benefits none of the bickering parties today.

Democracy and stability are in the best interests of everyone in the country today. But if our men in power, no matter in parliament, the presidency, opposition benches, in uniform, in the courts or even on television do not learn a lesson from the past, it is probable that the system may crash, taking them all along with it. Perhaps the powerful men in Pakistan should try to borrow something from Benazir Bhutto’s wisdom and read her Reconciliation for a change.

Originally published in Daily Times dated 19 November 2009. Click here to visit the original.

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