Fie Oh Democracy!
By Syed Osman Sher
Melville, New York
Rising from the wilderness of five years of self-exile, Tahirul Qadri, basically a cleric, and a politician only on the periphery, has shaken so violently the columns of the edifice of ‘democracy’ in Pakistan that the political clique was thrown into a spin which continued for more than three weeks. Scared that they had been entrapped in the confines of Islamabad by him and his followers, the so-called democratic Government, having no support of the people with them, had to form helter skelter a large delegation, drawn from various political parties, for negotiations. The democratic Government seems to have succumbed to his demands, aimed primarily at political reformation in the interest of true democracy in the country.
What is ‘democracy’ in Pakistan but a handmaiden of the jagirdars, and what are jagirdars but those who ridicule the government of the people. True to the spirit of democracy as the embodiment of equality of citizen and voice of the people to be heard through its majority, India abolished the jagirdari and zamindari systems immediately after Independence. The founding fathers of Pakistan, who had the support of such jagirdars in its creation, thought it fit for a very large section of the citizens to continue in their servitude with a muffled voice. Those architects of the country had scorned ‘democracy’ also in many other ways throughout the negotiating process. For this, let us sneak a peek in our history.
After the abolition of Mughal monarchy, when the British colonial power tried to introduce political reforms by giving some rights of franchise to the native people for electing representatives to local bodies in 1892, the acknowledged leader of the Muslims of India of that time, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, showed an attitude, which may be termed as undemocratic, when he expressed his fear that “the system of representation by election means the representation of the views and interests of the majority of the population…. [which] would totally override the interests of the smaller community.” “It would be like a game of dice, in which one man had four dice and the other one.” According to him, a democratic regime meant majority rule, which would definitely be a Hindu rule. He insisted that “India is inhabited by different nationalities”, and, therefore, he argued that the English-style representative institutions could not fit in the context of India, where elections would be contested not on a basis of personalities or parties but purely on community or ‘communal’ lines.
In 1906, a deputation of thirty-five self-appointed representatives of the Muslims, led by Sir Aga Khan, presented a petition to the Viceroy of India, Lord Minto, at Simla, and expressed the same old fear about what ‘democracy’ would mean for the Muslims; it was likely ‘among other evils, to place our national interests at the mercy of unsympathetic majority’. As such, Muslims ‘should never be an effective minority’. Therefore, the Muslims should be elected only through Muslim electorates. Disregarding the numerical size of the Muslim community the British should go beyond the numbers in conceding them representation and other rights bearing in mind the 'political importance' that the community had commanded only a hundred years earlier.
Agreeing to the demands of the Muslims for Separate Electorate, the Secretary of State, Viscount Moreley while discussing the India Councils Act of 1906, stated as follows: “ Only let us not forget that the difference between Mahomedanism and Hinduism is not a mere difference of articles of religious faith. It is a difference in life, in tradition, in history, in all the social things as well as the articles of belief that constitute a community.”By this Act, the Muslims were detached from the mainstream of Indian nationalism, and they proved themselves as the demolisher of the democratic principle that majority speaks, and majority rules. It was also the official nail in the coffin of democracy.
One day before the 1940 Pakistan Resolution was passed by the Muslim League, Mohammad Ali Jinnah had argued thus: “The British Government and Parliament and more so the British nation, have for many decades past brought up and nurtured with settled notions about India's future, based on developments in their own country which have built up the British Constitution, functioning now through the houses of Parliament and the system of Cabinet, their concept of party government functioning on political planes has become the ideal with them as the best form of government for every country…Muslim India cannot accept any Constitution which must necessarily result in a Hindu majority Government. Hindus and Muslims brought together under a democratic system forced upon the Minorities can only mean Hindu Raj. Democracy of the kind with which the Congress High Command is enamored would mean the complete destruction of what is more precious in Islam.”
We now see why ‘democracy’ has the feet of clay in Pakistan.
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