pakistan-elections
Recently an article by Farahnaz Isphahani titled “Democracy does deliver” (dated September 29, 2009) appeared in a section of the press. Having read some of Ms Isphahani’s previous security papers I can appreciate her mastery over words. However if I was expecting something ethereal from this piece I was sorely disappointed. What she lauds as a diplomatic win and which she considers a proof of democracy’s deliverance unfortunately is nothing more than the assurance of further foreign aid and not any historic empowerment of this nation. If my memory serves me right aid was given during the time of the recent dictator too. Similarly events like the FoDP also used to take place including Musharraf’s groundbreaking address to the American Jewish Community. Hence I hardly see it as sign of democracy delivering.
If democracy indeed delivers we should have seen a government more sensitive to the wishes of its own people rather than to the foreign accolades. As a student of international politics, she knows well that words and overtures hardly matter. What matters is a government’s capacity to govern its country and hence its popularity at home. Otherwise Musharraf too wasn’t unpopular in the international circles. He lost popularity here and was shown the door. Leaders in the third world aka new world are similarly short changed every other day.
If aid were enough for our development we should have been among the considerably developed countries of the world by now. But we clearly aren’t. The president’s recent statement in the UK that Pakistan needs more trade not aid, then, is most welcome. Yet even trade without domestic production is not enough. However that seems practically impossible given the crippling power outages in the country and the government’s credibility and transparency gap. We all know that the party returned to power with the huge baggage of troubled reputation. Even if that tarnished image was a frame up, one would have hoped that this time it would have learnt some lessons, but now that too unfortunately seems akin to being foolishly simplistic. Just like the capital in economy, political capital is a precious commodity. And at the heart of this capital lies trust. If a government fails to win the trust of its citizens, the torrents of criticism reduce it to the depths of insecurity. You cut deals after deals with the devil to stay in power and yet power at this cost becomes nothing but a mere anathema. It is not a quite a hidden secret that the past two terms of the PPP were cut short by the allegations of corruption. While Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto had to go in exile, her husband and our current president had to endure a huge spell of imprisonment. So this time the party and its government could have played a more cautious role. A stitch in time saves nine, they say. And a little more attention to details, transparency and sensitivity to the public perception could have done the trick. But no sir, just like in the past, the party has alienated almost every segment of the society through its antics and semantics, within a short span of time. There must be some special recipe for such an unmitigated disaster and yet when the government cannot hide how poorly it has performed in the public opinion, it picks the gun and shoots the messenger. No doubt then that just like Joseph McCarthy its media managers spend more time in dubbing every critic, unpatriotic. This brand of McCarthyism has compromised considerable precious time which could otherwise have been used to solve a few more problems of the country. More >