Opinion

Why Pakistani Democracy Doesn’t Last for Long
By Ahmed Quraishi
Islamabad, Pakistan

A new democratic start has the blessing of almost every Pakistani citizen. But the jubilation should not eclipse a bitter reality: Pakistani democracy will not be able to sustain itself without making major structural changes.
During the past five years, with the boom in information technologies, middle class Pakistan has asserted itself and wants to be part of the political discourse. For the first time, Pakistanis as young as eighteen-years-old have participated in electing their representatives.
But the Pakistani political system in its existing shape reflects little of the ground realities in the 21st century Pakistan.
Our parliamentary democracy has built-in problems that cannot be corrected without some changes in the 1973 Constitution. Pakistani democracy has conflicting power centers, political parties lack internal transparency, and serious administrative problems that have the potential to explode into full-blown ethnic conflicts. Several players in our neighborhood are already exploiting this to the hilt.
The end result of this domestic tension is that Pakistanis today sit on the world’s hottest piece of strategic real estate but appear to be unable to hold on to it.
Internal power struggles over the past three decades led our politicians and intelligentsia to focus too much on preserving. There was no time left for anyone to think about improving the system. The latest Pakistani parliament, expected to result in a weak coalition government, reinforces the need for wider change.
The conflicting power centers in the Pakistani democracy is a serious problem. This structural problem within our democracy is probably the real reason behind the perpetual political instability in Pakistan over the past half century. It has resulted in military interventions which bring a period of stability. But we return to square one as soon as the old system is restored.
The military-led Musharraf administration tried in good faith to solve this problem by introducing the National Security Council, a good first step but not a permanent solution. A better way is to have a strong chief executive in the federal capital directly elected by the Pakistani voters. In a lighter vein, and since some of our politicians don’t want to hear the word ‘president’ these days, let the prime minister be this strong, directly elected chief executive. But in the end, he will have to be called a president.
Another glaring structural glitch in our existing political system is that it has gradually created an ethnic problem where none existed at the time of our Independence. The Pakistani ‘Commentariat’— the chattering classes made up of politicians, journalists and television commentators — never noticed that in the past few days, the debate on who should be the next prime minister suddenly turned ethnic. No one even bothered to talk about merit. We are not even concerned that our democracy is gradually taking us toward ‘Lebanonization’, where power is divided along ethnic and religious lines.
Our failed political parties have reinforced this unfortunate trend in the latest election. Most of the parties, with the relative exception of PPP and PML-Q, emerged as either provincial or ethnic parties with no national agendas. This should not be a surprise since almost all of our major politicians are landed elites with very local interests. And we can see this fact in action in the case of the murder of Benazir Bhutto. She fell victim to a known terrorist who has a name, a location and is known to be pursuing a shadowy anti-Pakistan agenda. But no politician has mustered the guts to call him by name. Why would an elitist politician form Sindh, Punjab, NWFP and Balochistan do this and invite the wrath of the terrorists when it really doesn’t affect his or her massive local interests?
And now an entire range of major issues — water, finances, development work —I s hostage to this growing administrative problem that is turning into an ethnic one. Many nations in the world solved this problem administratively, by dividing their provinces into manageable administrative units and giving them a local parliament with a directly elected chief executive so that everyone gets busy in real useful work.
Not to mention the biggest glitch of all in the Pakistani democracy — the inability to produce fresh leadership. Sure, things will change over time if we let the system work. But that means a long time. And time is a luxury we don’t have. Without institutional change in our democracy and in the book that governs this democracy, the constitution, we will not be able to avert some of the problems that look us in the eye right now. If Israel can bring a dead language – Hebrew – to life through an executive decision and impose it on its people instead of leaving it to time, why can’t we do simpler things, like correcting structural problems?
Bold changes were expected from President Musharraf’s military government, when people were overwhelmingly ready for change. But Mr. Musharraf proved to be a benign military ruler and probably too democratic for his own good. The other way to introduce bold changes into our democracy is through politics. But our politics appear to be too vengeful and divided right now to allow for the emergence of any strong leader who can lead to change and ensure that everyone is on board.
The Western media has written critically about us in the past year. But as a Pakistani, I never felt more embarrassed than when Dr. Henry Kissinger last week wrote the following words describing the intellectual caliber of the existing Pakistani democracy: “[It] has more of the character of [relations] among Italian city states during the Renaissance described by Machiavelli than of the party politics of traditional democracies.”

For those of you who studied political science, the type of politics in Dr. Kissinger’s example led to mutual destruction.

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