Politics is a good word

The March 9, 2008 agreement between Pakistan’s largest political parties to form a coalition Government could mark the beginning of the end of military-bureaucratic rule in the country. Until now, Pakistan has been governed by an alliance of politicised generals, bureaucrats, intelligence operatives and professionals or technocrats who have prevented politics from taking its course.

The Co-Chairman of Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) Asif Zardari and the leader of the Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) Nawaz Sharif have both suffered in varying degrees at the hands of the establishment. They have been falsely charged with crimes as diverse as corruption, murder and hijacking of an aircraft.

The PPP-PML-N agreement was signed exactly one year after the arbitrary removal of Pakistan’s Supreme Court Chief Justice by General Pervez Musharraf. The chief justice’s refusal to go away quietly and Musharraf’s subsequent repressive measures led the country’s civil society and middle class into recognising the fallacy of the notion of a benign or enlightened autocracy.

Now there is a wide consensus among Pakistanis that for good or for bad, democracy is the way forward for the country and that there can be no democracy without politicians. Only Musharraf still claims that he can provide stability to Pakistan. Everyone else, including his erstwhile US backers, recognises that Musharraf is now a marginal figure in Pakistan’s future. The politicians he maligned for years are the ones with popular support.

These politicians have become wiser with time and are unwilling to accept manipulated squabbling among them that derailed previous attempts at establishing democracy. Since the elections of February 18, both the PML-N and the PPP have effectively thwarted establishment-backed efforts to divide them.

Musharraf and his coterie will still continue to try and sow the seeds of discord among the elected politicians, reflecting the deep-rooted antipathy towards politics cultivated by Pakistan’s ruling oligarchy. The politicised generals, technocrats, senior civil servants, international bankers and global businessmen who have virtually controlled the fate of Pakistan in long periods of military rule have also worked hard to depoliticise discourse about governance in Pakistan.

Only last week Musharraf declared that parliamentarians should not waste their time in politicking and should focus on governance. Trained to think of governance as only administration, Musharraf does not understand that politicking is an integral part of government.

Before the military’s direct intervention in government under Field Marshal Ayub Khan in 1958 Pakistan’s politics were by and large civil, cooperative and non-violent. Patronage, protest and policy differences were all factors in the political process, as they are in any non-authoritarian system. But Ayub Khan began a process of demonising politics and politicians that continues to this day.

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