Last February Pakistan held its 11th national election in 77 years of its existence. And as was widely expected, it is seen by many observers at home and abroad as a ‘royal mess’. Questions are raised over the manner in which results were compiled, and the amount of time it took the Election Commission to announce them.
Many suspect ‘selective’ rigging by ‘powers that be’ across large parts of the country, with an aim to prop up the proxies that would do the bidding of those powers.
But this is nothing new in Pakistan.
The story of Pakistan is one of remorseless tug and pull between the civilian and military rulers on the one hand, and the liberal and religious forces on the other. In the process, the country has failed to become either a democracy, a theocracy or a permanent military dictatorship.
The chief casualties have been the rule of law, the state institutions and the process of national integration, with grave consequences for the civil society.
The ‘Talibanisation’ of the north-western region is one manifestation of the prevalent disorder; an unending separatist campaign by nationalists in the south-western Balochistan province is another.
Meanwhile, sectarian and ethnic tensions have kept the two largest provinces – namely Punjab, which is the bread-basket of the country, and Sindh, which is its trading and industrial mainstay – perennially unstable.
How and why did all this come about?
Hybrid system
The country was born in 1947 with a potential to follow in one of two directions.
It could opt for democracy. It had inherited democratic institutions and experience from the colonial rule, and was itself the creation of a democratic process involving national elections, parliamentary resolutions and a referendum.
Or it could become an Islamic emirate. The Pakistan movement was based on the theory that the Muslims of India were a nation and had a right to separate statehood. They were granted separate electorate by the British rulers, and used Islamic identity as their main slogan during the elections held in 1937 and 1946.
But instead of making a clear choice, the early leaders tried to mix the two, and inadvertently sparked a series of political, legal and religious debacles that define today’s Pakistan.
In political terms, democracy has been the first casualty of this hybrid system.
Its foundations were shaken by two controversial decisions made by the country’s founder and first Governor-General, Mohammad Ali Jinnah.
He dismissed the Congress-led government of the then North West Frontier Province (NWFP) by decree, and instead of ordering fresh elections, appointed a Muslim League leader, Khan Abdul Qayum Khan, as the chief minister with the mandate to whip up parliamentary support for himself. Secondly, he declared to a large Bengali speaking audience in Dhaka, the capital of East Pakistan, that Urdu would be the only state language.
The first action created a precedent for Governor-General Ghulam Mohammad, a former bureaucrat, to dismiss the country’s first civilian government in 1953. Since then, the governor-generals, presidents, army chiefs and Supreme Court judges have dismissed, or upheld the dismissals of, as many as twelve civilian governments that together ruled the country for 36 years. The remaining 34 years have seen direct military rule.
Mr Jinnah’s second action alienated the Bengali population of the eastern wing, and set a precedent for the West Pakistani rulers to neutralise the numerical superiority of East Pakistan through legal entrapments and outright disenfranchisement.
After the secession of East Pakistan in 1971, the military rulers, backed by the bureaucracy and the judiciary, have repeatedly vitiated the federal and parliamentary character of the 1973 Constitution, thereby alienating the three smaller provinces of the remaining country.
Legal safeguards against tyranny fell by the wayside in 1954 when the then Supreme Court justified the governor-general’s dismissal of the government and the parliament by invoking the controversial ‘doctrine of necessity’. Under this theory, nearly every dismissal of a civilian government, and every military takeover were upheld by the higher judiciary, undermining democratic traditions.
On their part, the military rulers have co-opted both surrogate politicians and religious extremists as instruments of political strategy and national security policy.
The political recruits have provided a civilian façade to military governments, while religious and sometimes ethnic extremists have tended to distract and destabilise governments run by secular political forces.
Aid to dictators
The military rulers have been aided in this by the Western powers, led by the United States of America, who have tended to use their crucial financial and military support selectively against democratic governments.
The pattern is unmistakably clear.
The first large-scale American food and military aid started to pour into Pakistan in late 1953, months after the dismissal of its first civilian government. It continued for a decade as Pakistan under a military regime joined various US-sponsored defence pacts – such as Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO), Cedntral Treaty Organisation (CENTO), etc – against the Soviet Union.
The US started having problems with Pakistan when an elected government came to power in 1972, but poured billions of dollars into the country when another military regime took over in 1977 and agreed to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Similarly, while the elected governments that followed during 1988-99 had to live with a decade of US sanctions, the military regime of General Musharraf, that ousted the last civilian government in 1999, remained a ‘well supplied’ ally in the post-9/11 US ‘war on terror’.
Since 2008, the military has abstained from stepping directly into the power corridors. And keeping in tune with the past, the Western aid to Pakistan has nearly dried up.
Troubled democracy
Unlike India which the British colonisers handed to Congress, a political party having wide grassroots support, Pakistan was handed over to colonial institutions, namely bureaucracy, judiciary and the military. This arrangement continued until 1970, when the so-called ‘Eastablishment’ finally gave way to popular demand for democracy and the country’s first general elections were held.
But instead of putting an end to the power of bureaucratic-military establishment, it sparked a new cycle of push-and-pull.
Within four years of the democratic rule, the military returned to power by staging a coup in 1977, and within the next two years it sent Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the popularly elected prime minister of the country, to the gallows.
And when the political storms triggered by this tragedy failed to subside, the establishment crafted a puppet regime through non-party elections held in 1985. This system crashed in 1988 and party-based general elections under the Constitution, which was passed in 1973, became inevitable.
So, to keep the elected governments in check, the establishment brought in the famous 8th Amendment to the Constitution, empowering the president to dismiss any elected government solely on his discretion.
Not surprisingly, none of the elected governments that came to power during 1988-99 could survive in office for more than three years. These included the governments headed by the military proxies – namely the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz – that had been brought into power back in 1985 but were now evolving into a full-fledged political entity.
There was another spell of martial law during 1999-2007, which saw the democrats and ex-proxies-turned democrats unite to wage a struggle for democracy. The military had to step back yet again, and this time the democrats repealed the 8th Amendment by consensus.
For the first time in the country’s history, two successive elected parliaments were able to serve their entire five-year term in office. However, none of the elected prime ministers could serve out their entire tenure and were ousted, this time by the top judiciary of the country. These ousters were based on charges of corruption, which are yet to be proved under a credible legal process.
During the first and second decade of the 21st century, when nearly all political forces had evolved a consensus that the country be run according to the Constitution, the establishment was busy preparing another proxy, the Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI), whom it finally brought to power by massively rigging the 2018 elections.
What happened afterwards is still fresh in the minds of the present generation. PTI chief Imran Khan started out as a proxy of the military establishment just as Nawaz Sharif had done before him. And just as Nawaz Sharif ultimately turned against the military, so did Imran Khan, but with the difference that he, and his followers, defamed the military for its political management like no one had done before.
The current elections have been held under this atmosphere, and faults in electoral management, whether deliberate or due to administrative incompetence, have not only triggered widespread protests and allegations of rigging at home, but also attracted negative reviews from international observers.
Thus, the story of Pakistan continues to be one of despotic regimes using religious extremists as an external support to keep the secular democratic forces at bay; and when these forces do assert themselves, to tie them down in administrative and legal constraints that are designed to ensure their failure.
It is the story of a society that has been going round in circles for the last 77 years.
The writer is a former BBC correspondent and a senior journalist.
