Daily Times

According to this newspaper, while addressing the inaugural session of the Association of SAARC Speakers and Parliamentarians conference, President Asif Ali Zardari said, “Some people might feel parliament was still under assault from some quarters, but these were teething problems of a genuine democratic transition. These are the dying kicks of an old order.” The growing pains of the democratic order and the dying pangs of the old order might not be too worrisome if a whispering campaign was not underway even as an elected government is a few months shy of completing its term.

While an overt military intervention is highly unlikely, the president and other civilian leaders, especially Mian Nawaz Sharif, must not let their guard down as various suggestions are being floated around to throw a wrench in the system. For example, a veteran editor/television anchor recently talked about exploring the option of a presidential system along the lines of the United States where “technocrats serve in the president’s cabinet” to replace parliamentary democracy. But the current president of the Pakistan Academy of Sciences Professor Dr Attaur Rahman beats this editor hands down. In his recent column in a national daily, Dr Rahman bashes parliamentary democracy, praises dictatorship and predicts the demise of the country if the present democratic dispensation were to continue. He writes:

“Some argue that the reason democracy has failed in Pakistan is that it was not given a chance to evolve and flourish due to interventions of military rule. There could be nothing farther from the truth. Military interventions were forced by the rampant corruption and mis-governance that brought the country to the brink of disaster each time…What, then, is the answer? Surely, military rule is not. The parliamentary system of democracy can also not work in a country where the feudal system has its stranglehold on national politics. The problem with the parliamentary system is that powerful landlords spend hundreds of millions of rupees in the election process to come into power. Once in parliament, or better, in the cabinet, the ‘investment’ made in the election process is recovered by corrupt practices in major national projects. I advocate major changes in the Constitution that will result in a presidential system of democracy so that the best person is elected as president, as in the US, France and other countries. He then selects his own team of professionals in the cabinet. Members of parliament or the Senate should be confined to lawmaking and oversight and they cannot become federal or provincial ministers. All persons contesting any election should be required to be approved by a “Judicial Council of Elders” on the basis of their eminence, honesty and competence for the positions.”

Interestingly, the above piece is a slightly rehashed version of another article by Dr Rahman in another national daily. Now the good professor did not have any qualms about serving in various capacities as the chairman of the Higher Education Commission, advisor, federal minister of science and technology and education. And it was no less than under the military usurper General Pervez Musharraf and his quisling Shaukat Aziz alongside a cabinet packed with feudal and crony capitalists for just under a decade, but the good Dr clearly has problems with an elected government. There are other problems with Dr Rahman’s suggestions too. For starters, he is not the first one to have stumbled upon the panacea of the presidential form of government. It has been a fantasy of those looking for a quick fix for the problems of governance since almost the country’s inception. After all, it was Field Marshal Ayub Khan and his associates who first declared that Pakistan’s peculiar demographics and conditions were not conducive to democracy. Ayub Khan tasked a constitution commission to probe the ‘progressive failure of parliamentary government’; he had this commission deliver his Basic Democracy fraud in the name of ‘blending democracy with discipline’.

Dr Rahman is either oblivious of the long, arduous journey of constitution making that Pakistan has gone through, or is suppressing this history. He and other proponents of the presidential system also seem to ignore that the constitution is not just about executive authority but also about the federal structure and relationship of the federating units with the centre, the legislature, the economic aspirations/model, the judiciary and, in Pakistan’s case, the balance of the civil-military relationship as well as religion.

Merely replacing the person at the top has never worked in the past and there is no clear reason why it should now. An assumption is that directly electing the president would somehow autocorrect all problems, but it ignores not only the centre-provinces relationship but also skirts the critical issue of whether a gubernatorial form of government, as at the state-level in the US, would follow in tandem. Three out of the four provinces are clearly multi-ethnic and the fourth and largest is already debating division along linguistic/administrative lines. How would a gubernatorial system reconcile the relationship between the Baloch and Pashtuns in Balochistan, Pashtuns and non-Pashtuns in Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa and ethnic and non-ethnic Sindhis in Sindh is unclear. Ayub Khan and Musharraf’s adventurism unleashed havoc in East Bengal and Balochistan, respectively.

In his previous columns, Dr Rahman has clearly advocated an unelected government installed by the judiciary and the army. But even if his suggestion was to be accepted at face value, he is being less than candid about the US system and wants to cherry-pick from it. Yearning to see technocrats run the show and the candidacy for public office to be approved by the Judicial Council of Elders smacks of Dr Rahman’s desire to see another Amir-ul-momineen (Leader of the faithful) and his minions at the helm. The members of an American president’s cabinet are not necessarily technocrats and include many politicians, of which the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is a prime example. But more importantly, the cabinet, as well as the justices of the US Supreme Court, go through a rigorous vetting process and confirmation by the elected members of Congress. Checks and balances also provide for significant oversight of presidential powers by Congress.

Dr Rahman had quite commendably debunked Agha Waqar’s claim of running an automobile off a ‘water kit’. He may wish to consider that there is no short cut to good governance and no political equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. Unfortunately, Dr Rahman’s water kit democracy is effectively a call to upend democracy with constitutional autocracy and should be swiftly rejected.

The writer can be reached at mazdaki@me.com. He tweets at http://twitter.com/mazdaki