Threats hanging over polls

IN the controversy surrounding the forthcoming elections it is seldom realised that their credibility is threatened as much by voters abstaining from the polls as rulers trying to rig them.

When sceptics ranging from the man in the street to world leaders seek assurances against rigging, President Musharraf readily and persuasively obliges but hardly anyone is inclined to believe him.

If he were also now to assure people that voters would turn up in numbers large enough to make the elections truly representative, the number of those believing him would be fewer still.

It lies in the power of the president, and no one else, to reform the institutions responsible for conducting and supervising the polls to inspire confidence in their fairness. But it would be beyond his power, or anybody else’s, to induce voters to leave the safety of their homes on polling day if a bomb explodes or rumours make the environment generally scary.

Historically, voter turnout in Pakistan has been low. In the last five elections — held in 1988, 1990, 1993, 1997 and 2002 — the national average of listed voters casting their ballot was around 40 per cent. In the NWFP and Balochistan, voter turnout was less than 30 per cent because traditionally in these provinces fewer women vote. In the tribal areas and the Baloch hinterland, they don’t vote at all.

The turnout this time round could be even lower than the past because of boycotts, disturbed conditions in vast swathes of the country and, more important, because of public apathy. Two senior and sensible, though presently disgruntled, political leaders — Mustafa Khar and Qazi Hussain Ahmed — conjecture that not even 25 per cent of voters will turn up to vote for they wouldn’t know what they are voting for.

The European Union parliamentarians in Brussels seemed to be entertaining similar doubts when they asked President Musharraf quite bluntly whether elections would lead to a true democratic order in Pakistan. They could only squirm when he replied that he had already introduced the ‘essence of democracy’ in the form of local councils and they should not expect Pakistan to come up to the same standards of democracy and human rights that had taken Europe centuries to achieve.

In Brussels Musharraf must have learnt, if the fact really eluded him in the military environs at home, that local councils alone do not make a country democratic. His pet theme of empowering the people at the grassroots, the women and minorities impresses neither the exponents nor the practitioners of democracy.

The world now recognises only two forms of democratic government — presidential (as in the US) and parliamentary (as in England or India). Local councils are an essential part of both. Pakistan has to choose one of the two. Our constitutional scheme and structure is parliamentary. It cannot pass for a democracy if the president can dissolve the very parliament that elected him at his direction, but he himself can be removed only by a two-thirds majority and that too if found insane or guilty of violating the Constitution or of gross misconduct.

The power to dissolve the National Assembly combined with many other powers that Musharraf has acquired by amending the Constitution or through the sheer weight of his army command have put him in a position to lord over the parliament, the cabinet, the prime minister, the election commission, the judiciary, the provincial governments and even the local councils. His power thus exceeds the powers of the president of the US and the British prime minister put together.

If Pakistan were to be a parliamentary democracy, Mohammadmian Soomro and not Pervez Musharraf should have been talking to the parliamentarians in Brussels. It is this contradiction between the constitutional scheme and actual practice that makes the world wary enough to believe that Musharraf must rig the polls for he has vast powers and a five-year term that has just begun to protect.

But it can be plausibly argued that he can surely protect his term, if not all his powers, by holding fair elections rather than rigging them. And if he does not rig them, no one else can or will. Therefore, he should instantly agree to reconstitute the caretaker governments (at the centre and in the provinces) and the election commission to the satisfaction of his opponents.

A number of retired generals, admirals and air marshals have now endorsed the stand of the political parties (almost all other than the Q League and the MQM) that elections can be fair only if conducted by a new and independent election commission and neutral cabinets. All of them cannot be wrong.

My hunch is that most politicians and Musharraf’s critics too would be willing to go along with an arrangement under which an independent election commission and neutral cabinets are established, nazims are put aside and polls are held on Feb 18 and no later. That done Musharraf would not be able to rig even if he wanted to. The question of whether he should stay or go can be left to the new parliament which hopefully would be fully representative of public opinion.

Elections should end the current crisis and not exacerbate it or give rise to a new one more serious which they surely will if attendance at the polls is very low or the result of the ballot is falsified.

When all has been said, one must take note of two facts with a sense of shame. First, in ‘Hindu’ India, an election commission headed by a career civil servant has been seen publicly admonishing the chairman of the ruling Congress party, Sonia Gandhi, and the fanatical Gujarat chief minister, Narendra Modi, for their conduct during electioneering. In ‘Islamic’ Pakistan, an election commission comprising all judges is widely viewed as a puppet of the government.

Second, in the area of political rights and civil liberties, Pakistan (ruled by law) ranks lower than Afghanistan (ruled by warlords) in the 2007 listings of Freedom House, an august American think-tank and lobby group. Is there room to sink deeper? Indeed there is — by boycotting or rigging elections.

Rescheduling elections?

SYED Zafar Ali Shah, vice-president of the PML-N, said last week that since elections were not held within 60 days of the National Assembly’s dissolution, the government should wipe the electoral slate clean and reschedule the elections. Evidently, he means that elections should be held sometime after (not before) Feb 18.

I assume he has made this statement at the behest of Mr Nawaz Sharif. It has been suggested also that postponement will give the parties boycotting the elections time to reconsider their position. There is more to this curious departure from the party’s earlier stand than meets the eye.

Until a few weeks ago, Mr Nawaz Sharif was asserting that his party would stay away from elections held under the Musharraf regime because they would be patently farcical. Participation in them would signify approval of his rule. Mr Sharif called upon the opposition parties to boycott the elections. If they did so, the people at large would see the elections as bogus and repudiate them. He and others could then launch a mass movement to oust Musharraf.

The Jamaat-i-Islami and a few other groups agreed to boycott the elections. Then the late Ms Benazir Bhutto got hold of Mr Sharif and convinced him that the intended boycott would serve only to leave the field open for PML-Q to take the seats which might otherwise go to his party.

As a result, Mr Sharif changed his mind. Then came the emergency rule and the sacking of judges (Nov 3, 2007). He toyed with the idea that their reinstatement should be a pre-condition for his party’s participation in the elections then scheduled for Jan 8, 2008. Ms Bhutto reasoned that the future of the deposed judges should be left to the post-election government and parliament. Her view, once again, prevailed.

Mr Sharif was now all set for the elections. His party was among the first to publish an election manifesto, and it proceeded to finalise the award of party tickets to candidates. It made a few seat ‘adjustments’ with other parties. Mr Sharif urged his associates to give their full attention to the party’s election campaign, and he himself proceeded to address rallies and public meetings in Punjab in support of PML-N nominees.

All was going well, but then on Dec 27, 2007, Benazir Bhutto was assassinated. Mr Sharif rushed to the hospital where she had been taken, saw her body and reportedly cried and sobbed like a baby. Her magic had evidently touched him too. Distressed and stressed out, he concluded that it could not be ‘business as usual’ for him and that his party must stay away from the elections.

Benazir’s own family and the PPP elders were even more distressed. But unlike Nawaz Sharif they decided that they must continue her ‘struggle’ for the restoration of democracy and, to that end, honour her resolve to contest the elections. Thereupon Mr Sharif changed his mind once again and decided that in that case his party would also participate. In view of the widespread disorders and violence that followed Benazir’s assassination the government postponed the elections to Feb 18.

Notwithstanding the high regard in which Mr Sharif may have begun to hold Ms Bhutto, the fact had eventually to be faced that her party was going to be his own party’s principal rival in the coming elections. There were areas (such as rural Sindh) that were the PPP’s stronghold and where it was going to be the winner in any case. But then there were others (numerous constituencies in Punjab) where its victories could not be taken for granted, where PML-N could be a force to be reckoned with, and where one’s gain would be the other’s loss.

The PPP was generally expected to come out of the elections as the largest single party in the National Assembly if Ms Bhutto had lived. Now that she had been killed, the ‘sympathy’ vote would probably give it even more seats than it might otherwise have obtained. Mr Zardari and his associates in the PPP were cognisant of this prospect.

They were ready to contest the election on Jan 8, figuring that the sympathy for their loss would be the highest at this point, but they went along with its postponement to Feb 18, expecting that the sympathy factor would still be operative. The same calculations steered Mr Sharif in the opposite direction. Feb 18 as the polling day was to be preferred to Jan 8, for the additional six weeks might work to dissipate some of the sympathy for the PPP.

But if the elections were further postponed to a date in the distant future, the advantage to the PPP resulting from Benazir’s death might disappear altogether. That would obviously be a welcome development for PML-N. Time could work to the PPP’s detriment. Mr Asif Ali Zardari’ s standing in public esteem might decline, and the inefficacy of Bilawal’s chairmanship of the party might become more apparent. Factional fights between the party’s higher echelons might develop and destroy its internal cohesion. These potentialities, if they materialised, would work to PML-N’s advantage. Hence Mr Sharif’s call for rescheduling the elections, and, hence Mr Zardari’s opposition to it.

A couple of other considerations may also be relevant. Mr Nawaz Sharif and many others have been demanding the replacement of the present caretaker government by a ‘national’ or ‘consensus-based’, or neutral government and the reconstitution of the election commission to make it truly independent and competent.

The presently scheduled election is barely three weeks away. Regardless of the merits of these demands, it should be clear that they cannot be met within the time left. Postponement would make for the time needed. But time alone is not all that is needed. Pervez Musharraf and his advisors have to be persuaded that these demands are proper, and they must also have the will to implement them. These conditions do not exist at this time.

Pervez Musharraf is not stepping down, he does not concede that the government he has installed and the existing election commission cannot, or will not, hold free and fair elections. His insistence on the adequacy of these arrangements may not be tenable, but it is there and it is not about to be given up. Elections will not be postponed again.

It is open to Mr Sharif once again to boycott the elections scheduled for Feb 18. He may attempt to recruit other politicians to his camp and initiate a mass movement to overthrow the Musharraf regime. These attempts will go nowhere, and if he persists in them, he will accomplish nothing other than a continuation of the political turmoil currently afflicting the country. Given the ground realities, the better part of wisdom for him may be to participate in the elections on Feb 18, gracefully accept the voters’ verdict, and hope that they will treat him and his party more generously next time.

The writer, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, is currently a visiting professor at the Lahore School of Economics.

anwars@lahoreschool.edu.pk

Of risks and rogues

T.S. Eliot once wrote of history being shaped by “vast, impersonal forces”, a phrase that might seem particularly fitting in the case of financial history. No individual investor can alter the flow of the great tides of sentiment that runs with the bull –– or the bear.

At least, so goes the conventional wisdom. But a week that started with a trading-room tsunami streaming right round the planet closes with at least the possibility that the whole thing was unleashed by a single 31-year-old with a passion for judo.

A middle-ranking employee of the Société Générale, Jerome Kerviel was on Thursday revealed to have blown 4.9bn euroes (£3.7bn) of other people’s money in high-stakes wagers known as derivatives, which amplify gains and losses on the market.

In more conventional share transactions only a fraction of the stake is typically gained or lost. So offsetting Mr Kerviel’s position required the French bank to cash in perhaps 40bn euros in shares. And that is trading on a scale with the power to move the market.

It is no surprise that SocGen on Friday initiated legal moves against its rogue employee. But the indications are that he was not out for immediate personal gain. While much remains murky, it seems he may have done it for the thrill. Just as ministers and mandarins have no understanding of the IT systems, his seniors lacked the wherewithal to grasp what he was up to.

Finance, however, has a very particular problem due to the proliferation of complex transactions. While the Kerviel bet involved a relatively straightforward punt on the stock market, contracts depending on interdependent contingencies have mushroomed in the last decade. The value of the world’s annual output is now less than half of that attached to these impenetrable papers. Proponents say the complex exchanges are all about ensuring that risks are passed to those most able to bear them.

At Davos, Gordon Brown on Friday set out his ideas for reforming the financial system. He argued that globalised governance should be the counterpart of globalised markets. That is an obvious truth, but it is not put into practice: when the French authorities first knew that SocGen would be making a massive sell-off, they failed to inform their counterparts overseas.

The prime minister pleaded for more transparency in the distribution of risk. That would certainly be a good idea, and Mr Brown is right to believe that an approach based on openness would have fewer economic costs than the alternative of a regulatory crackdown. The difficult question, however, is whether it is truly deliverable.

As Mr Kerviel has reminded the world, as long as financiers can get away with it, far from rationally allocating risk, some will choose instead to indulge the human impulse to gamble.

––The Guardian, London

A reason to believe

WHEN I was 10 years old, I saw on the nine o’clock news on PTV a woman with a dupatta draped round her head saying, “Pakistan tareekh kay aik naazuk mor say guzar raha hai.” Then I turned 20 and again saw a woman, this time not wearing a dupatta on her head, saying with eloquence on the nine o’clock news, “Pakistan tareekh kay aik naazuk mor say guzar raha hai”.

Déjà vu… why? I tried to analyse the situation to find out how come Pakistan is still stuck at the naazuk mor even after the passage of many long years. I reached the conclusion that 50 per cent of our knowledge lies in asking the right question. Government functionaries, intelligentsia, armed forces, critics, human rights activists and, for that matter, all stakeholders ask questions. But they end up slinging mud at each other, for the simple reason that the questions they ask are never right in the first place.

The question usually asked is: “Why is the state of health and education in Pakistan in such dire straits?” The complacent response is: “At least we have some schools and a few hospitals. Something is better than nothing.”

After pondering over the state of education and health in our country, I realised that the “something is better than nothing” view cannot apply to education and health. Just imagine, would so many youth have agreed to become suicide bombers if proper education had been provided to them by the state? If they had been only taught to ask the right questions and had inter-faith dialogue at the institutions they attended, they would have thought thrice before embarking on mindless missions and most definitely have refused to be used as a pawn in the hands of others.

When it comes to healthcare, a lukewarm (something) effort — by a doctor of questionable credentials (something), to cure a patient by giving him a substandard (something) medicine or injection — has a high probability of killing the patient rather than curing him.

Quality education is every citizen’s right and its responsibility lies with the state. A paradigm shift is required in the mindset of state authorities, the people and the education system to save our future generations from destruction. The first step towards this shift would be changing the textbooks.

Just by building schools, training the teachers, increasing administrative controls, the issue of providing an education that makes a ‘thinking’ individual, will not be addressed. A student must learn from the textbook how to learn, change and inquire freely rather than becoming a “lakeer ka faqeer”. If we want our future generations to ask the right questions then a culture of discussion, interaction, proactive thinking and asking questions needs to be encouraged.

It’s high time that a quantum leap was taken in the education and health sectors. Nothing is as powerful as the idea itself, whose time has come.

The problems of education and healthcare are just the tip of the iceberg. Multiple interventions are required to turn the country around. To name a few: The state’s failure to provide timely justice (more than 70,000 under-trial prisoners are languishing in Pakistani jails), housing, power, employment, communication, clean drinking water (without which 250,000 children die annually) has created problems that should prompt the rulers to declare an emergency.

Whenever these questions are raised or talked about, most of us say, “Oh bhai! This is Pakistan.” My answer to this cliché is, where you live should not determine whether you live happily or live poorly and die.The difference between a developed or developing — rather declining — country is that people in the former are given a ‘reason to believe’ by the state and the media, that they are working to achieve and maintain a decent living. Whereas in the latter case, the state and the media fail to create this ‘reason to believe’ for the citizens. In the absence of this ‘reason to believe’, citizens lose a sense of direction and move and act aimlessly. The absence of this also leads to lack of thinking, questioning and movement by the citizens.

Only having a ‘reason to believe’ sets the ball rolling — slowly, but in the right direction. It is not strange when extraordinary people do extraordinary things. But when they have a ‘reason to believe’, even ordinary people start doing extraordinary things. That is precisely the moment when a group of people start turning into a great nation.

The writer, a pop singer, is president of Zindagi Trust, an organisation working for child welfare and education.

royzad@gmail.com