The game of prediction

PAKISTAN is about to open a new chapter in its torrid political history. After one of the major political assassinations in the country’s history and the postponement of the elections by a month and a half, the nation is set to go to the polls on Feb 18.

In an emotional meeting with the foreign press in Islamabad on Jan 3, President Pervez Musharraf said that it was his strong belief that the elections will produce a government that would be able to address the many problems the country faces at this point. He said that in addition to the promise that the elections will be fair, free and transparent he was also making another pledge: they will be held in a peaceful environment.

The results will show how free and fair the elections were since there is enough information available about the political opinions of the Pakistani public against which to test the results. To begin with, people are very unhappy with the way the government in Islamabad conducted itself in 2007. There is great revulsion at the way the Supreme Court was handled; great anger at the imposition of a state of emergency in Nov 2007; considerable unhappiness at the changes in the constitutional structure; lingering frustration with the way Islamabad is towing the American line on what Washington calls the ‘war on terror’; and lack of satisfaction with the way income and wealth have been spread following the recent surge in the economy.

In addition to all these negatives, there is also unease about the way the government initially handled the investigation into the death of Benazir Bhutto.

All this should affect the performance of the Pakistan Muslim League-Q. The people will react if the party does extraordinarily well in the polls. What we saw in 1977 may be repeated in 2008. That said there is not much fondness among large segments of the population for the leaders of the two of the mass parties. It is unlikely that in a free and fair election, any of these three political parties — the PML-Q, the PPP, and the PML-N — will have a commanding presence in the National Assembly. One of them could, however, win a majority in the provincial assemblies of the Punjab and Sindh if the contest is free and fair.

The religious parties that were able coalesce in 2002 and win a sizable presence in the National Assembly — the MMA won 11 per cent of the votes and one-fifth of the total seats in the national legislature — are likely to do considerably less well this time around. With different positions taken by the Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam and the Jamaat-i-Islami with respect to the elections, the MMA is effectively split.

Some rather precise predictions were made for the results of the elections if they were held on Jan 8. It was said that the current structure of government, with power still resting with the old order in the caretaker administration and with the nazims able to exert considerable authority, the PML-Q will win 115 seats out of a total of 342.

The PPP will be the second largest party with 90 seats. The MQM will win 20 seats in Karachi and Hyderabad. The three, working together, will have 225 seats in the new National Assembly, which would be a comfortable majority of 66 per cent. The new administration in Islamabad would, therefore, be a coalition of three parties led by the PML-Q.

Such precise numbers remind me of the discussion in the Council of Defence and National Security (CDNS) established by the then President Farooq Leghari. The CDNS was a part of the interim set-up that saw the transition from the Benazir Bhutto-led government that ruled from 1993-96 to the government led by Nawaz Sharif that governed from 1997 to 1999. As the finance chief in the caretaker government, I was a member of that ten-person body. In a meeting held in late January, the head of ISI made a prediction that no party will gain an absolute majority in the National Assembly.

A few days later, Nawaz Sharif and his party swept the polls with large enough majorities at the centre and in the Punjab to totally dominate all other political parties. Sharif had a presence large enough in the National Assembly to amend the constitution twice. These amendments helped him to consolidate his power by reducing those of the president and the members of the national and provincial assemblies.

The purpose for recalling this history is to remind ourselves that in politically underdevopled societies such as Pakistan, elections are very hard to predict even if there is no government interference. This has been demonstrated once again by the recent elections in the Indian state of Gujarat where the exit-polls predicted a razor thin majority for the BJP led by Narendra Modi. Instead the results produced a commanding majority for his party. I don’t believe that the caretaker administration that oversaw the polls in Feb 1997 used its power to influence that year’s elections. However, the ISI did keep a close watch on what was going on in the country and yet its calculations were way off the mark.

However, even if predictions are hard to make they can have a profound influence on the post-election period. If the outcome is widely off the mark from the one generally expected by the citizenry it creates political currents that may be hard to control by the government in power.

This is precisely what happened in 1977 but not in 1970 and 1997. On these three occasions the elections produced highly unexpected results: a victory in 1970 for the PPP in what was then West Pakistan and a total sweep by the Awami League in the then province of East Pakistan.

In 1977, the opposition coalition was expected to do much better than it actually did against the ruling PPP. In 1997, the election did not produce a hung parliament as was predicted by the intelligence agencies but a total victory for one of the two mainstream parties. The only time people did not accept the official results was in 1977 when they came out in large numbers to protest against the outcome. The result of that agitation was the imposition of martial law a few months later.

This time around, there is a general expectation of no clear victory for any of the main parties, least of all for PML-Q. A recent poll conducted by the Washington-based International Institute has concluded that 70 per cent of the citizenry thinks that the government headed by President Pervez Musharraf does not deserve re-election.

A result that goes totally against these kinds of expectations could prove to be extremely disruptive for the already disturbed political situation. This is reason enough for those in power today to keep their hands clean and stay away from manipulating the results.

If the impression is created that whatever results are announced by the Election Commission don’t really reflect the popular opinion, Pakistan will enter yet another period of political uncertainty. This the country can not afford.

In the line of duty

THE death of a breadwinner is never a statistic. It is a human tragedy which has recurring implications, like concentric ripples that continue long after the pebble that caused them has sunk from view.

Each day until they themselves die the families of all those who died in suicide-bomb attacks will suffer, in their own different ways, the pain and the consequences of these senseless attacks.

They too have become victims — living victims, who have to survive something their breadwinner could not.

Watching scenes of carnage — whether on Sharea Faisal at Karachi or outside Liaquat Bagh at Rawalpindi or opposite the GPO at Lahore — should have reconciled most of us by now to our fragile mortality. Images repeated relentlessly on news channels should have inured one to the omnipresent companionship of death.

Nothing though is preparation enough for the sight of sixteen stark coffins, hastily assembled from planks of unseasoned wood, their uneven lids nailed down haphazardly, lying shoulder to shoulder on charpoys, just as their lifeless occupants had stood earlier that day in the line of duty outside the High Court of Lahore.

These sixteen policemen were only some of those who had died in that attack at Lahore on Jan 10, but they are symbolic of a commitment our nation’s police force makes daily to deter, to guard, to protect, and if necessary to die so that others may continue to live.

It is in a sense ironical that while the lawyers’ community within the High Court’s railings was agitating for the protection of the law, the policemen deployed outside on duty stood armed but defenceless against a sole, determined assassin.

It is perhaps symptomatic of our lack of common concern that, later that same night, there was not a black coat visible amongst any of the 500 or so mourners who stood in the Police Lines off Empress Road to bid farewell to the police martyrs.

There was police everywhere — men in uniform, in plainclothes, swathed in chaddars against the biting cold. There was press everywhere — cameramen, commentators with their handheld microphones, reporters with their ears compressed flat by mobile phones, and press photographers jostling for the perfect photo-op.

Eventually, at 11.00 pm, the VIPs came, stood in the front row ahead of the other mourners, and then offered the namaz-i-janaza while the cameras clicked noisily like restless crickets. For some reason the namaz was read twice — once for eight shaheeds, and a second time separately for another eight.

After the VIPs left, the grieving families were left to retrieve their own. Some of the coffins bore labels, others not, but each pallbearer knew who he had come for.

As each coffin was borne aloft and carried to the waiting ambulances that would transport them to their villages — some to Sheikhupura, a few to Kasur, one or two to other suburbs of Lahore — one was overwhelmed by the impersonality of it all. No name was called, no roll-call taken of those who had been martyred, no individual reference by which one could identify who they were, not even their police badge numbers.

Except to their bereaved colleagues and families, they were a step away from becoming a statistic in the next morning’s papers.

Only those employed in our police force know that true extent to which they are called upon every minute of their working lives to serve and to obey, to endeavour despite the odds, to wear a uniform with dignity and with posthumous courage, even a shroud. The average citizen prefers to limit his contact with the police.

It is an understandable reluctance on the part of those who subcontract their security to the state or to private guards. The cost of the latter is quantifiable; the cost of state security is beyond calculation but it is one borne in the end by the entire community, and more often than we are prepared to admit by the policemen themselves.

Every morning, there is a pot-bellied policeman who stands at a particular street corner in Lahore’s Defence Housing Society.

He waits for a lift from anyone — a motorcyclist who will then be forgiven for flouting the laws by having a passenger ride pillion, or a considerate motorist, who does not mind listening to a policeman’s lament.

If you were to ask him how he reaches his duty station every day, he will reply that it is through the kindness of strangers like yourself.

If you ask him at what time he leaves his house each morning or returns to it every night, he will reply that he leaves soon after dawn and returns home long after dark.

And does he have any children? “My wife tells me we have five children,” he will say, simply. “You see, they are asleep when I leave in the morning and they are in bed when I return at night.”

It is more than likely that on that fateful morning of Jan 10, the children of those sixteen shaheeds were asleep when their fathers left them to go on duty. That night, their fathers returned as usual to sleep, this time forever.

Our real rulers

OVER the last sixty years the people of Pakistan have blamed and condemned their presidents, prime ministers and chief ministers for all the ills that plague our country. They believe that the holders of high offices in Islamabad and the provincial capitals have all the power to set things right. In reality it is not so.

Our rulers are rulers only in name. They rein in a titular capacity and can be brought in and kicked out of the structure of governance like total non-entities. This can happen only to the powerless. I had asked the former Prime Minister Feroze Khan Noon whether he was aware that Ayub Khan and Iskander Mirza were planning a coup against him and that Ayub Khan had moved a brigade from Hyderabad to Karachi in early Oct 1958. His answer was in the negative. When asked what would he have done if he had known. “Nothing,” he said.

When I told Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in Nov 1974 that he had only two years to build his people’s power before he is ‘nudged overboard’ by the establishment, he answered: “I do not have the power to do what you want me to do.” Then, who has the power in Pakistan?

Pakistan is ruled by a combine of civil and military services which are self-governing, self-perpetuating and independent institutions. They rule in tandem and they have a powerful foreign patron, the United States.

The common wisdom that the military rules over Pakistan is only partly correct. The military does not become the ruler of Pakistan by dismissing, arresting and deporting prime ministers and presidents and locking up the parliament or by having a large say in the making of the defence and foreign policies.

Except in the brief period of martial law, when the military courts are operating and the chief martial law administrator has not assumed the title of the president, the civil services of Pakistan are the real rulers. They rule through a vast system of police stations, lock ups, magistrates, jails and revenue collecting networks, the basic state apparatus of governance.

They exercise their powers under the law which also authorises them to call the military out of its barracks for assistance. The military is the last resort for the civil services and it is the military which serves the civil and not vice-versa.

No officer, civil or military, howsoever superior in rank, or an elected member of the government such as a minister, prime minister or president, has the authority to order a district officer in performance of his executive duties.

Policy may come from above but its implementation is in the hands of local officers at the district level. No disciplinary action can be taken against a non-complying officer who can only be transferred from one station to another.

In 1942, as the Japanese forces entered India in the Northeast, All India Congress launched the Quit India Movement. The British faced their most critical moment after 1857. The government arrested top leaders of the Congress and New Delhi issued orders to districts all over India to arrest Congress leaders as they come out to protest publicly.

The Superintendent of Police in Dera Ismail Khan, Sardar Abdul Rashid, on receiving the orders from his Deputy Commissioner, asked him under what section of the law should he arrest Mr Bhanju Ram who was due to lead a procession to the District Courts the next morning.

They searched the law books in vain. At midnight the Deputy Commissioner phoned the Chief Secretary NWFP to secure guidance. “The matter is left to the discretion of local officers,” said the Chief Secretary, after a discussion with the governor, to anxious officers at Dera Ismail Khan. Abdur Rashid arrested no one as the procession came out the next morning and completed his service as one of the most distinguished police officers of Pakistan.

In the 1930s, a superintending engineer from PWD extracted an order from the Viceroy of India, Lord Willingdon, to demolish the unauthorised bathroom installed under the orders of Lady Willingdon in the Viceregal Lodge in New Delhi.

Also in the 1930s the audit department of the government of India made the Viceroy pay Rs56, 000 out of his own pocket as he had irregularly ordered to be transferred from one sub-head of his travel budget to another in order to meet the costs of a particular tour.

In 1968, the District Magistrate, Lahore, F.M.K. Bandial refused to obey orders of the Punjab government, direct orders from the governor of Punjab and ignored the advice of the military contingent on duty and allowed lawyers to take out a procession on The Mall, Lahore. Everyday scores of district officers tell ministers, MNAs and MPAs that the things they want to be done cannot be done under the prevailing rules and regulations.

And yet when they want, they do what their superior officers or politicians want them to do by bending, twisting or violating rules and regulations, under their own signatures and responsibility. In our system of governance the civil officer is supreme.

Pakistan has gravely erred in not changing the imperial system of governance which was specially designed to deny democratic power to the people of India. Pakistanis also failed to mobilise the power of the people to transfer the basic elements of state power — of maintaining peace and dispensation of justice — from salaried officers of the civil services to the elected bodies of the citizens, as practiced in the US, Canada, Australia and Scandinavian countries.

Free and fair elections for legislative assemblies do not usher in democracy for Pakistan. We never achieve a government of the people, by the people and for the people.

What we get is a ‘democracy’ where people are replaced by civil and military officers and their rich industrialists, traders and land owning supporters. It is their government, by them and for them.

It is a great pity that to protect their vested interests, no mainstream political party, civil society activists or Harvard and Oxford educated intellectuals have advocated that the police administration at the level of city, town and Union Council should be put under their respective elected bodies. None advocate that all criminal cases should come up before a panel of citizens agreed to by the accused and the prosecution to determine guilt or otherwise (the exception of the PPP-SB proving the rule.)

Mobilising people’s political power seems to be the only way to take Pakistan out of the 60-year old morass.