Daily Times

Two elements in a recent Supreme Court judgment will have important bearing on our system of governance. One of them is taken well while the other is problematic. Concluding that the sellers of CNG are making enormous profits, it has ordered the price of the product to be reduced substantially. Second, it has declared that the president, being the symbol of the unity of the federation, should not play a partisan role in politics. This will reinforce the Lahore High Court’s earlier judgment that he should not act as co-Chairman of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP).

If the CNG price was exorbitant, it was the executive’s responsibility to correct it. In numerous other instances, the court has taken action that more appropriately should have been taken by the federal or a provincial government. Beyond pronouncing upon the constitutional validity of a law that the legislature has made, the court has the function of adjudicating disputes between opposing parties concerning their mutual rights and obligations. It is not its function to go after thieves and robbers. A robbery becomes its business only when the accused appears before it to plead that he is innocent. Thousands of wrongs are being committed in society every day. It would be insufferable frustration for the court to try to prevent or punish them all on its own initiative. It would also violate the maxim, which political forces routinely announce, that all institutions should remain within their appointed bounds.

The constitution names the prime minister as the chief executive and head of the government. It appoints the president as head of state but allows him no authority in the process of governance. He signs the bills parliament has passed. He may veto one of them but parliament may override it, in which case it becomes law even without his concurrence. He addresses parliament and in doing so is expected to lay out the policies and programmes the government intends to pursue. It is assumed that his speech has been prepared by one of the prime minister’s designees.

The present incumbent, Asif Ali Zardari, has been operating in his own fashion. He says he intends to address public meetings and rallies in aid of his party’s election campaign. The courts have held that he must remain a non-partisan head of state. They have maintained also that he must give up either the president’s office or the co-Chairmanship of the PPP. No one else is equally capable of leading the PPP. If Mr Zardari insists on playing an active role in the elections, he would probably invite the charge of contempt of court. What is he then to do?

Needless to say, Mr Zardari would be loath to give up either one of his offices. The likelihood is that if he could not wear both hats he would discard that of the president. The problem that his presidency poses may disappear with the conclusion of the next parliamentary elections.

Mr Zardari says he does not intend to run for re-election. But if he changes his mind, and if the PPP does not emerge as the majority party or as the senior partner in a coalition, he will have to settle for the modest role that the constitution assigns to his office. Following the next election, if Mian Nawaz Sharif happens to become the president and Mian Shahbaz Sharif his prime minister, the president’s office may once again be energised beyond its appointed limits. If these developments do not materialize, the office of the president will be reduced to a symbolic role. The arrangement in which the president is head of the state and the prime minister the chief executive is working well in parliamentary democracies.

Some of our political observers hold that we need a presidential system because the parliamentary form of government does not suit our genius. In my reckoning, this advocacy is not well founded. First, its proponents do not tell us what kind of a presidential system they have in mind. Beyond the Latin American republics, most of which are authoritarian, the US is the only democracy that maintains a presidential system. The parliamentary type prevails in all of the others. We in Pakistan have experimented with both forms. We have had four parliamentary regimes (1947-58, 1973-77, 1988-99, and 2008 to date; and four presidential: 1958-69, 1969-71, 1977-88 and1999-2008. All of the presidential regimes had resulted from coups carried out by the army chiefs. They were dictatorships and that of Ziaul Haq (1977-88) is remembered as having been the most ruthless, cruel, and self-aggrandizing one in which national resources were plundered and opponents and dissidents were flogged and in many cases killed.

The proponents of a presidential system do not want a repeat of the kind we have had in the past. They want one in which the president is elected by the people and is accountable to them. He picks capable men, including technocrats, as his ministers, who are responsible to him and not parliament. The president will not have to make deals with legislators to ensure his own security of tenure and he will more likely give the country a clean and efficient administration. These advocates overlook a critical problem. Where will the president get the money to finance his programmes?

In the American model, the president can neither raise revenues nor allocate the proceeds to various heads of expenditure. These functions belong to the two houses of Congress. This division of powers has been in vogue for more than 200 years and the two sides, executive and legislature, have come to be at ease with it. If the National Assembly and the Senate in Pakistan were to respond to the executive’s budget proposals item-wise, the bargaining process would get out of hand. Legislators will flood the executive with impossible demands in return for their support. In sum, a presidential form of government would not necessarily work better than a parliamentary system in Pakistan.

The writer is professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts and can be reached at anwarsyed@cox.net