Pakistan is in the election mode. Nation-wide polls are slated for May 11, which means six weeks of hectic election fever gripping the land, starting from now.Pakistan’s tryst with democracy has a tragic history. Concomitant to it, its tale of elections reads like a roller-coaster ride, with more downs than ups written into the script. Pakistan’s truck with the election process has stayed locked with its tortured and crooked history of governance. It took Pakistan more than eight years to write a constitution for the country.
The first-ever general elections were scheduled to be held at the end of 1958. However, just weeks before the D-Day, General Ayub Khan imposed on the country the first of a series of martial laws to come. General elections were sent packing. Ayub held his own brand of elections — a controlled one — in 1962 through an electoral college of loyal minions — eighty thousands of them — who were given the misleading title of ‘Basic Democrats.’ The hand-maiden National Assembly thus formed dutifully approved a new constitution drafted by Ayub, who then presided over a system of governance in which all the strings were pulled by him and him alone.
The first ‘free-and-fair’ general elections were held, on the universal basis of one-man-one-vote, only at the end of 1970 by Ayub’s anointed military successor, General Yahya Khan. But the outcome of those elections turned the tables on Yahya’s expectations of a hung parliament. The majority province of East Pakistan gave its vote, en masse, to the Awami League of Mujibur Rehman. That outcome was anathema to Yahya and his coterie of conspiratorial politicians, like Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, of West Pakistan. What followed from that impasse is history.
Bhutto, in power since the break-up of Pakistan, was an autocratic wolf in the garb of a democratic sheep. His lust for unbridled power was just incorrigible. He couldn’t resist the temptation to rig the general elections called by him in the spring of 1977. He was looking for a two-thirds majority to enable him to amend the constitution and bring in presidential form of government in place of parliamentary. His bluff was called by the opposition. A mass movement against him was then hijacked by the then military Bonaparte, General Zia-ul-Haq who toppled Bhutto and hauled him up the gallows with a murder conviction from a sham trial.
Zia’s military rule ended with his death in a plane crash in 1988, after which civilian rule returned to Pakistan and Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif alternated in power for two terms each over the next 11 years. However, the civilian hold on democratic governance was at best tenuous. Pakistan’s notorious ‘establishment’—of military generals, feudal barons and power-addicted bureaucrats — wouldn’t allow BB or Nawaz to wield power on their own; they were never allowed to complete their terms in office; every parliament was sent packing, prematurely. Pakistan’s experimentation with elected democratic rule remained abortive and tentative.General Pervez Musharraf, the last military dictator who ruled from 1999 to 2008, tried his hand at ‘manufactured democracy’ by presiding over the birth of a ‘king’s party’ whose votaries were — not surprising, at all, in the Pakistani context — largely feudal barons. In the end, however, Musharraf’s macabre act to cast himself in the role of a ‘democratic-despot’ backfired when his overseas mentors — who’d anointed him as their ‘front-line’ ally in the ‘war on terror’ — pulled the rug from under his feet.
The 2008 general elections, which Musharraf was compelled to call because of the terms of a deal he’d cut with BB at the command of his western patrons — and those of hers, too — were peaceful and orderly. However, a big price in blood had been exacted by the Taliban terrorists before that came to a pass when, in December 2007, they murdered BB in cold blood in Rawalpindi. Her elimination from the scene paved the way for the revival of her husband, Asif Zardari’s political fortunes. Pakistanis have good reasons to enter the current phase of elections with a lot of trepidation and foreboding. Their date with elective democracy has disturbingly come with a hefty — and often bloody—price tag. And things don’t look rosy at all at the end of a full stint of 5 years under the outgoing Pakistan People’s Party. For the first time in its tortured history, political power is going to be transferred from one civilian set-up to another without any interruption from Pakistan’s known power brokers and barons.
Indeed it’s a welcome development which gives hope that democratic maturity and sense of responsibility is inching up — although slowly and belatedly — in the Pakistani political calculus. However, it doesn’t accrue to the credit of the civilian leaders that they performed so well that the military — the traditional spoiler in Pakistan — was kept at arm’s length from the political arena. On the contrary, the civilian set-up proved to be so endemically corrupt and incompetent, and spawned such a plethora of social malaise and economic doldrums that it worked as a disincentive to generals seizing power. The odds against a peaceful and uneventful passage between now and the election date, of May 11, still seem daunting for the simple reason that Pakistan’s landscape has been blighted, over the past years, by unprecedented terrorism, sectarian blood-letting and deadly political vendettas. But all is not devoid of elements of hope and sanguinity. For the first time in Pakistan, there’s a truly independent Election Commission headed by a retired justice of the Supreme Court whose integrity and credentials are both impeccable. Justice Fakhruddin G. Ibrahim, with Mumbai roots, is a no-non-sense man who takes his cue from no one. The commission under him has been given teeth to bite, where necessary, by constitutional amendments. A lot has been borrowed from the Indian example, next door, to empower the commission with genuine authority. The sudden return of General Pervez Musharraf to Pakistan, after a self-imposed exile of 5 years abroad, can muddy the waters and throw spanners in the work of many parties.
So, all bets are off as far as the sensitive issue of law and order is concerned. Anything can happen between now and the election date. Pakistanis hoping for an orderly march to their day at the polls must learn to contend with yet another roller-coaster.
Karamatullah K Ghori is a former Pakistani diplomat.
E-mail:k_k_ghori@yahoo.com