The Pakistani government is approaching the end of its five-year term. Assemblies must be dissolved by March. An interim caretaker government will then be installed. Its mandate is limited to holding free, fair and transparent elections. These are expected to be held within 90 days of the dissolution of parliament.
The temperature is rising. Political parties are ramping up their electioneering. Analysts and commentators in the print and electronic media are holding court. Conspiracy aficionados are peddling their favorite scenarios. The public, battered by five years of “democracy” is watching all this with dazed indifference. They seem to know that, in the end, nothing will change.
The structure of Pakistani politics is such that only a certain set of people are able to successfully contest elections. These are mainly feudal landlords who, with their vast inherited landholdings, dominate rural Pakistan. They are joined by a smaller subset of the descendants of Muslim saints known as “peers.” The peers passed away centuries ago. But their usually less than saintly descendants have become caretakers of their shrines and have donned their sacrosanct mantles. They are the new peers. Their acolytes worship them as they once did their worthy ancestors. Add to these a motley group of smugglers, drug traffickers, and extortionists and the picture is complete.
These are the people who will sit in our assemblies when the elections are over. These “electables” — as they have come to be known — switch loyalties quickly from one political party to another, depending on their perception of which party is likely to muster the votes to form a government. Often, they hedge their bets. A brother will be in one of the two main parties, and another in the second. It is “heads you win, tails I lose.” Either way they rule.
The sad inevitability of election results is the source of much anguish amongst the public. Thinking people among them wonder if things will ever change. To be sure, there was a glimmer of hope. A relatively new party led by a former cricket hero seemed to be gaining traction. The party promised to bring new competent and educated people to the fore. But it stumbled. Thinking that the only way to get to office was to include the “electables” it reneged on an earlier promise to exclude them.
So we are back where we started. The two main tried and disgraced parties seem to be poised once again to dominate the nation’s politics. Yet, there is much speculation that their ride back to power may be interrupted. One scenario sees broadening the scope and term of the caretaker government. In this scenario the caretaker government will have a mandate not just to hold free and fair elections. But it will also clean house, recover looted public wealth from the current set of politicians, and redesign the political system to produce a level playing field which will empower sincere, clean and competent people to enter the political process.
This latter point is especially important. Lasting change cannot happen — at least not in the visible future — without redesigning the political system. And the single most important step is to dispossess the feudal landlords. The lands which they claim as theirs were in fact gifted to their forefathers by the British. The gifts were made as reward for services rendered. These included providing conscripts to fight in wars, rearing horses for British forces, and yes, for colluding with the occupiers to spy and tell on local resistance. Perhaps the number of young Indian men — for India was one at the time — who were lynched on “intelligence” provided by the feudals runs into the tens of thousands.
A future Pakistani government can declare that all land gifted by the British during their rule of the subcontinent stands transferred to the state. This single step would represent a quantum shift in Pakistani politics. The nemesis that has stalked us since independence would finally be put to rest.
There is no doubt that the general public would welcome a caretaker government that could enact such change. But this is beyond the scope envisioned for it in the constitution. And there would be a plethora of questions: Who will set it up? Who will lead it? What would be the limits of its authority? Would the changes it makes to the political system be acceptable and workable?
Change seems difficult, but the yearning for lasting relief has become so strong that adherence to constitutional niceties may well not hold it back much longer.
