: Since Zia grabbed power from Bhutto in 1975, this is perhaps the sixth time that there is a serious effort at “civilianising” the power structure. The choice of the rather inelegant civilianising over democratisation is more apt, and that is the expression many Pakistanis prefer to use. The nuance is important. You can have “democracy” in the sense of having an elected cabinet with a prime minister. But how much power does that prime minister have? What is the power equation between him and his president? Further, to whom does the president owe his power?
Some of this is rooted in the politics that began in the mid-’80s in Pakistan, under General Zia. He was the second military dictator in Pakistan to bring in “democracy” without civil control, Ayub having tried a version of it in the ’60s. First, Zia was to hold elections without political parties and then confer on his “elected” prime minister, the late Mohammed Khan Junejo, many powers, but none on his foreign, security, Kashmir and India policies.
The reason this peculiar division of powers survived Zia was that he co-opted in it the one element that commanded real power in Pakistan, a trinity of the army, the ISI and the presidency, then specially empowered by what was called the 9th Amendment, which gave total unquestioned power to sack elected governments. Sure enough Zia had brought in that amendment as a welcome gift to Junejo’s cabinet. It was then that Aitzaz Ahsan, always one of the brightest and bravest stars of Pakistan’s democracy movement, had described it as a “bonsai” democracy. A bonsai, he said, that would not be allowed to grow deep roots or large branches, but would be displayed in a corner to please the Americans. The reason this survived the democratic catharsis that followed Zia’s death, however, was that he had convinced the trinity that politicians were too unreliable to be trusted with Pakistan’s supreme national interest. Broadly, this was defined as control over foreign and security policies, armed forces and nuclear weapons. Dovetailed into this was the Kashmir policy. After Zia, President Ghulam Ishaque Khan, a former bureaucrat, became the custodian of this legacy. He did sometimes describe himself as the keeper of his nation’s family silver. He used the same argument, the unreliability of the political class, to dismiss elected prime ministers thrice (Benazir Bhutto in August 1990 and Nawaz Sharif twice,...
Shekhar Gupta
