What Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali, elected to lead Pakistan as its first civilian prime minister since the 1999 coup, has ahead of him is no easy task. His Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid party is seen by the opposition in Parliament as a puppet administration, which will allow President Pervez Musharraf to continue to exercise ultimate power. Since Musharraf has sought to institutionalize the political role of the armed forces, it seems almost certain that he intends to continue to keep many levers of government in his own hands, even though he hailed the elections as the moment when democratic government returned to Pakistan.
As a pure democracy, Pakistan may look unconvincing, but before the opposition parties set about seeking to undermine Jamali’s administration, because they perceive it to be illegitimate and as they would also argue, elected thanks to rigged voting, maybe there is something that they should take on board. It could be argued that Musharraf’s constitutional solution amounts to a compromise in a country where, historically, the lack of compromise has time and again led to political chaos. Pakistan’s officer corps are professionals, most of whom do not much enjoy their interventions in politics. Unversed in the complexities and subtleties of politics, their solution has been to bang heads together and to try and inject some semblance of discipline into political life.
None of these interventions deserves approval but they should be seen for what they have been — attempts to stop what the military perceived as political rot which was destabilizing the country. Since Musharraf seized power in 1999, the economy has stabilized and begun to perform. The price of this stability was a clampdown on political dissent but many Pakistanis may not have been unhappy at this turn of events.
In its 54 years, Pakistan has failed to find enduring political stability, in part because political parties used the democratic process as a battering ram to suppress opponents and then foster the climate of patronage and corruption that has disfigured public life. The compromise that Musharraf has created could represent an opportunity to short-circuit the bad old ways. If the parties in the opposition choose to follow the classic democratic model, they will use their position constructively to challenge and question the government on its decisions and policies. In so doing they could win the respect and confidence of the electorate, not just in their own performance but in the institution of Parliament itself.
If, however, they choose to go head to head with the administration, denying its legitimacy and using their parliamentary platform to denounce anything and everything it does, the result will be continued instability. Only if all legislators dedicate themselves to creating a workable parliamentary process will the military be presented with an unarguable case that they should withdraw. With an angry India on its eastern border and elements of the Taleban and Al-Qaeda along its western border, Pakistan needs politicians who can act with calm and deliberation. This is a time for statesmanship, not protest. The return to democracy on Musharraf’s terms may be hard to accept, but at least it is a start and for those who wish for full democracy in Pakistan, it is currently the only obvious way forward.
