Has Pakistani Democracy Touched Its Nadir?
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada

The spectacle was bizarre. One could have easily said it was surreal. But it couldn’t be so because it was taking place in Pakistan, a country known for its robber-baron politicians’ shenanigans and antics that may look macabre to those uninitiated into the Byzantine nature of Pakistani politics.
What transpired before the polls of Pakistan’s Senate, last week, was an orgy of lust—naked and brute lust for power. The ingredients of it were straight out of the recipe book of a B-grade Bollywood ‘masala movie.’
Here was this son of former PM, Yusuf Raza Gilani, given the boot from office by the apex court of the country, nearly ten years ago, for disobeying its orders. Gilani, it may be recalled, had defied Supreme Court’s repeated edicts to write a letter to the Swiss authorities for the repatriation to Pakistan $ 60 million, stashed away to the safety of Swiss banks by Pakistan’s notorious Zardari. It was just small change compared to the billions he had plundered from Pakistan. Gilani, obviously, put a higher bar on his fealty to his boss than honor the apex court’s command.
So, true to the last iota of the old dictum, like- father-like-son, the junior Gilani—Ali Haider is his name—seemed to care two hoots for the law of the land. The Election Laws, of 2017, clearly forbid soliciting votes in an election in return for money. But a son raised in a political culture where pelf and power-lust have no respect for laws for any kind couldn’t be constrained by any edict of the Election Commission. He had money—tons of it, obviously—to play around with and buy votes for his tainted father.
Never mind Senior Gilani’s shady past. In Pakistan’s free-booting political ethos, disqualification of any nature from a court of law is only as good as a pebble in your shoes that must be thrown away. What was at stake was far weightier than Gilani’s shunting out of his office of PM.
What made Yusuf Raza Gilani such a prized candidate to run for a Senate seat—that, too, from Islamabad, the cradle of power in Pakistan—on a ticket dole out to him by PDM, the motley opposition arrayed against Imran Khan (IK), was, precisely, his tainted past.
PDM luminaries—and what a crowd it is—wanted to thumb their noses at IK and make a statement: they’d the capacity to prick him right in the sanctum of his power by ‘reinventing’ Gilani and augur his ‘second-coming’ to challenge IK where it may hurt him most.
Therefore, sticking to the script that PDM stalwarts have followed all their tainted political careers, they set about the task of weaning IK’s party members away from him by using their caches of ill-begotten money looted from Pakistan by the likes of Zardari and Nawaz. The Sindh Assembly, in thrall to Zardari and his minions, was there to do their pickings. It was a friendly turf to poach on IK’s votaries. Gilani Junior took it upon himself to beard the lion in its den.
Never mind that he was taped, for record, live, offering tens of millions of rupees to those PTI members of Sindh Assembly who took his bait. When confronted by television news anchors, he verified the authenticity of the video that had gone viral. Without wasting a sweat, he proudly flaunted his credentials of a dutiful son soliciting support for his ‘illustrious’ father. It was no fault in his blinkered eyes that he was flouting the law of the land. To him, it was just carrying on a family tradition.
And why should the offender blink when the denizens of election laws lording over ECP corroborated his stance that he’d done no wrong. IK may have a lot to moan over how the Senate polling was conducted. But ECP came out blazing its own guns and proudly claiming credit for doing a superb job. To the ECP gurus they had conducted a squeaky-clean election.
As these lines were being written, news filtered in of ECP rejecting the IK government’s appeal to it to not certify Gilani’s tainted election. The Commission found no convincing evidence that the Gilanis—padre and son—had violated any laws or were guilty of wrongdoing.
IK and his advisers in the kitchen cabinet have a lot of head-scratching ahead of them in this ongoing episode.
With a friendly ECP on their side, the PDM sharks are now gleefully looking forward to another ‘kill’ on March 12 when the Senate will elect its Chairman and Deputy Chairman. It’s not a brain-teaser that PDM’s candidate for the coveted post of Senate Chairman is none other than Yusuf Raza Gilani. Their intent is to rub salt into IK’s wounds. As far as they are concerned, they are cock-sure of pulling off this dubious venture too by securing a win for their man and deflating IK further by inflicting another defeat on him.
IK has taken a lot of wind out of their sails by securing a vote of confidence from the National Assembly. But he’s on a slippery slope in the Senate. To be fair, he has a lot to blame himself for this denouement. His obstinacy is proving to be his worst enemy. Politics is a game of compromise, of give-and-take. There’s no last word in it. In fact, every word is the first word in politics. But Imran is not yet prepared to accept that the game of politics isn’t cricket. Unlike cricket, politics isn’t played according to set rules. A lot of innovation occurs as one navigates its often-treacherous shoals.
In a way, IK paved the path to his own humiliation and embarrassment over the outcome of Senate’s seat from Islamabad. It had been conveyed to him—in crystal clarity according to some loyalists of his—that the sentiment in PTI’s rank and file didn’t look kindly to Hafeez Sheikh’s nomination for the capital’s Senate seat. He’s an ‘establishment’ man, as known to all and sundry. Those who have given their life’s blood to nurturing PTI and Imran, as leader, loathed the idea of an ‘outsider’ like Sheikh being given the trophy. But IK wouldn’t heed their cries of anguish, just as he has consistently stuck to his guns on vociferous calls for showing the door to a dumb-witted and wooden Usman Buzdar in Punjab.
Politics is a cut throat sport with no mercy for the loser. Imran should know the rules of the game by now, which is that there are no rules in Pakistan’s hobbled and floundering democracy. As it’s, Pakistan’s democracy, hogged by feudals, waderas and their ilk, is an endangered species.
This scribe has never had a doubt that democracy run under the preponderance of feudals is a misnomer. Feudal ethics make no room for opposition of any kind. On top of it, the primer taught in the feudal nursery of politics says, unabashedly, that it’s only a means to an end; the end is plunder and loot of the nation’s resources. Power is meaningless unless it leads to tons of pelf. This fresh episode proves, beyond any shade of doubt, that money rules and leads democracy, Pakistan-style, like a puppy tethered to it. IK’s supposedly ‘new’ Pakistan is learning, to its pains, that filthy lucre has an endless shelf-life in Pakistani politics. IK must find an antidote, a vaccine, to get rid of this virus! - K_K_ghori@hotmail.com
(The author is a former ambassador and career diplomat)