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It’s been a nerve-wracking week and Pakistan has marked, amidst tumult, another birthday. At the ripe old age of 67, though, this country has still not worked through its restlessness, the desire for ‘something different’.
Problem is, nobody seems to have any idea about what that ‘something different’ may be in its nuts and bolts. A ‘corruption-free’ Pakistan, or equality and opportunity, or a nation re-imagined, are all very well, very beguiling. But they don’t come with blueprints.
Democracy isn’t working, people complain; first the PPP government and now the PML-N government have made no difference. What we need, I’m increasingly hearing, is an Ataturk who can change ‘the system’.
Is it possible to flirt any further with danger? In fact, what they mean is that we need a person with absolute power, who brooks no opposition and who can make the hard decisions that must ruthlessly be implemented. These are the same people that are prone to trotting out the opinion that with this populace, only the stick can work.
Pakistan is missing several of the ingredients key to revolution
What’s immediately wrong with this line of thinking is that it carries undertones of a military takeover — and, indeed, there are many who argue that the Ataturk discourse was started, popularised and sent down the wires by whatever the elements are that still see this as an expedient option for the country. Politicians, after all, working within a democratic set-up, will always face opposition, and will always have to negotiate their way through opponents, the Constitution and parliament. Only a dictator has the questionable comfort of brooking no opposition.
But the train for that has long passed. Pakistan’s already had a potential ‘Ataturk moment’, narrowly defined for my purposes here as the unfettered ability to make hard choices. In 1999, for a few years, we had at the helm a person who, irrespective of the means, had absolute power. Musharraf in his early years was in a position to railroad all opposition, and did not have to suffer wading through the turmoil of political negotiation. Whatever is said about him today and the unconstitutional methods he used to depose a legitimate government, let us not forget that back then his actions were even supported by several sections of society.
But, for various reasons, among them the fact Musharraf was no Ataturk in terms of being a genuine leader, the moment passed. Anyone who makes a plea for another such leader needs to look for him or her amongst the ranks of the political classes — perhaps grow one — who can battle it out through the electoral process. Another person with absolute power, another military takeover, may well prove the final straw for this benighted country.
The other thing that people seem to be talking about is of bringing about a “revolution”. Forget Tahirul Qadri and his cynical manoeuvrings and sloganeering, on the streets one hears the desire for an ‘inqilab’. People talk wistfully of the Arab Spring as though something along those lines would ‘fix’ Pakistan and its ‘rotten system’.
What, however, is a revolution at base but the removal by mass agitation of an unpopular regime? Well, that train too has passed. Pakistan already managed to bring down the curtains on a regime through widespread agitation in 2007.
While other factors were involved in the stepping-down of Musharraf and the holding of elections in 2008, of course, the fact nevertheless is that we had thousands of people on the streets, sit-ins and protests, arrests and detentions — and, thankfully, it didn’t on the whole involve too much blood-letting. Unfortunately, for the would-be revolutionaries and fortunately for the rest of us, today’s Pakistan simply doesn’t have several of the ingredients key to revolution, amongst them a society so suppressed that it resembles a close-to-blowing-up pressure cooker.
What Pakistan and its malcontents, whether from the citizenry at large or the political classes, need to recognise urgently is that the only thing that will work is the one thing that hasn’t been tried before: due process. It will take time, it’ll be testing and humdrum, and it won’t have all the sound and the fury we’ve been conditioned into thinking are inevitable. But if only we can stick to the election cycle, there is hope.
Governments have to be allowed to finish their terms, have to be brought to a point where they face the prospect of a resounding electoral defeat that is a direct consequence of their sins of omission and commission. Only then will this damaged, limping country manage to build enough muscle to walk. Remember the PPP’s showing in the last elections?
As another columnist pointed out on these pages last week, Pakistanis have become addicted to moments of supreme promise, unblemished and as yet uncharted as they are. We’re going to have to learn that the morning after, only the long, hard slog will do. Democracy isn’t a magic wand; there are no quick fixes.
The writer is a member of staff.
Published in Dawn, August 18th, 2014
