The agreement between former Prime Ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan, which has been hailed as historic, will only in truth be so, if these two archrivals have used their exile to reassess the whole nature of Pakistani politics and the extent to which their own behavior has degraded the political culture of their country.
It is the deadly rivalry of these two political leaders and all their predecessors that has so undermined Pakistan democracy since its creation. Instead of having principal political groups balancing each other in government and opposition, which is the classic democratic format, Pakistan’s politicians have always confronted each other as deadly enemies. Each tip of the electoral see-saw has been seized as an opportunity to crush the losers, exclude them from all political role and responsibility and reward supporters with massive and wasteful patronage within the civil service. It has proven a rotten and decadent system that has encouraged corruption and incompetence and, by robbing the direction of the state of any continuity that can survive political change, has stifled economic, social and political development.
It is good that the two leaders have agreed to form working groups drawn from members of their two parties to agree on a “wide-ranging charter for democracy”. These must not be mere political window dressing simply to win international support for the withdrawal of the military from politics. Even if Benazir and Sharif are themselves entirely convinced of the need for their two parties to turn over a new political leaf, they will find the message hard to pass on all the way down to their grass-roots supporters. The working groups must be used to confront this need.
The 1973 constitution has to be restored. However, once in place, it has to be respected and cherished by the politicians. While there is truth in the charge that the military has undermined the country’s constitutional institutions, it is not the whole truth. The civil administrations have never shown better respect for those institutions. It is because each of Pakistan’s essays into democracy has been marred by malpractice, incompetence, corruption and disrespect for law, institutions and healthy conventions that military interventions have been welcomed again and again by many Pakistanis who had become fed up and disillusioned by the venal and partisan behavior of their “democratic” leaders.
Vision is what has been utterly lacking from Pakistan’s politicians. That deficiency may at last have been recognized. It will, however, take far more than just three hours of talks and an apparent burying of their long-held political hatchets to demonstrate a real change of heart by these key players. The people of Pakistan are anxious to see if anything really fresh and hopeful will emerge from their discussions.
If, on balance, it looks like nothing is really going to change, maybe these two exiles should stay where they are. Their country cannot afford another democratic experiment that will bring further discredit to democracy.
