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Pakistan: Dictator's
democracy
By Ajai Sahni
It is
not entirely clear whether a Talibanized genie was
intended to appear out of the magic lamp of Pakistani
democracy - but it has.
The six-party Islamist
fundamentalist alliance, the Mutahidda Majlis-e-Amal
(United Action Front - MMA) has not only secured 53
seats in the national parliament, but a controlling
representation (48 out of 99) in the North West Frontier
Province (NWFP) Assembly, and the largest single party
status in Balochistan , with 14 of 51 seats.
And
significantly, it has secured a fair presence in the
other two provinces that went to elections - Sindh and
Punjab - as well, both in the national and state
assemblies. The enormity of this achievement can be
measured against the fact that no combination of
religious parties has ever secured more than 11 seats
(1988) in any previous national assembly, and the
religious parties were down to just two seats in the
last elections in 1997.
Maulana Sami ul-Haq,
central vice president of the MMA, and the head of the
madrassa (religious school) Dar-ul-Uloom Haqqania
at Akora Khattak, that spawned virtually the entire
leadership of the Taliban, interprets the mandate as
proof that "the masses have rejected the 55-year-old
tyrannical system of governance and want a just system
based on Islamic values".
As one of the chief
architects of, and advisor to, the erstwhile Taliban
regime in Afghanistan, it is not difficult to imagine
what his vision of such a "just system" would be.
Somewhat ominously, even as election results were
trickling in, 12 men accused of fighting alongside the
Taliban in Afghanistan were released from the central
jail at Quetta in Balochistan, with hundreds of jubilant
supporters from the MMA at hand to welcome them to
freedom. At least some Western commentators have spoken
of a worrying Taliban comeback through the Pakistani
ballot box.
These concerns can only be addressed
by time, but there are reasons to believe that, while
uncertainty and instability will remain the lot of
Pakistan, there is evidence that the elections
themselves may not alter prevailing conditions very
dramatically - certainly not in the near term.
The democratic make-believe of elections
notwithstanding, Pakistan remains firmly and
unequivocally a dictatorship under its President,
General Pervez Musharraf. As the European Community's
chief election observer in Pakistan, John Cushnahan,
noted, "The holding of a general election does not in
itself guarantee the establishment of a democracy ...
the Pakistan authorities engaged in actions which
resulted in serious flaws in the electoral process."
The National Human Rights Commission of Pakistan
(HRCP) has independently asserted that the elections
were "lacking both in fairness and transparency". They
came, moreover, after an extended process of
'pre-rigging', the revision of election laws to exclude
"inconvenient" candidates, and the Legal Framework Order
that was gazetted in August this year, which altered
some 30 rticles of the Pakistan constitution to ensure
that power was firmly retained by the general after the
formation of the new National Assembly.
Under
the circumstances - within a reasonable margin of error
- it is safe to suggest that the electoral outcome is
substantially an approximation of what the general
intended. He has a hung parliament, with the Pakistan
Muslim League Quaid-e-Azam, (PML-QA), widely referred to
as the "king's party" because of the explicit support it
enjoys from (and unqualified support it offers to)
Musharraf, emerging as the single largest faction in the
national assembly, with 76 seats. They were followed by
the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) of Benazir Bhutto,
with 62 seats.
Interestingly, the EU's observers
stated that the PML-QA had been one of the main
beneficiaries of official attempts to interfere in the
election. There is also some evidence to suggest that
the results in the NWFP and Balochistan were not quite
as surprising as they are being made out to be, and one
of the constituent members of the MMA, the Markazi
Jamiat Ahle Hadith, has declared the alliance mandate to
be "bogus", claiming that it had been "given" seats to
create political instability in the country through a
hung parliament.
This goes some way to confirm
former premier Bhutto's claim (although she is in exile)
that the frontier provinces were "handed over" to the
MMA and that, "Strategically, the military wants to hold
a red rag up to the West and say 'Look West, you need a
military dictatorship, because if there's not, then
pro-Taliban parties are going to come to power'." The
alacrity with which the PML-QA president, Chaudhry
Pervaiz Elahi, declared that the MMA was "the natural
ally" of his party also suggests a measure of
understanding between the two formations.
Democratic processes, however flawed they may
be, nevertheless have a tendency to set the unexpected
into motion, and can never be entirely orchestrated.
With their control of religious institutions, private
armies and the street power they enjoy, the religious
extremist parties could well be tempted to seek to
aggressively extend their areas of influence through a
combination of political action, religious mobilization
and violent intimidation. Their visible success also
creates the danger of relatively moderate Islamists
adopting their "model" of political action, a more
radicalized agenda, and eventual resort to armed force
and terrorism.
As the processes of government
formation are engineered, however, it is clear that the
king's party will have a controlling function in the new
administration at the center, and would also form a
government in the crucial state of Punjab - which
accounts for 60 percent of the country's population and
a dominant proportion of the Pakistan army, and that
constitutes the core of the power of the state in
Pakistan.
More significantly, Musharraf's
control over the army - and over the counter-terrorism
campaign - remains entirely undiluted, though the MMA's
"electoral victories" could provide him with an argument
to dilute operations against the Islamist terrorists.
Democracy in Pakistan, for all that it is worth, will
change little in the foreseeable future.
Ajai Sahni is editor, South Asia
Intelligence Review; executive director, Institute for
Conflict Management.
Published with
permission from the South Asia Intelligence Review of
the South Asia Terrorism
Portal.
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