The Rainbow Coalition
A week or so into the Referendum process, the equation has changed drastically in favour of the President, the rallies to muster support having only marginally to do with it. While the process of transformation from a soldier to a soldier-politician will have created new dynamics in his personality, Pervez Musharraf will never become a politician. It is out of character for him to deliberately represent something as true when he knows it is untrue. Most politicians fail to accept something as true even when they know it to be such. On April 16 he did his best to sound political, the Press Conference only managed to reinforce his military identity. Even his apology for the more-loyal-than-king police baton charge on journalists in Faisalabad was revealing, he did not like what happened and therefore was not averse to the need for “damage control” but as the Commanding Officer he took responsibility for the action of his subordinates and was not about to throw the Punjab Governor to the wolves.
What the President has managed in the past week is very far-reaching, a decisive shift in the political landscape in Pakistan. In the 1965 Presidential race between Field Marshal Ayub Khan and Mohtarma Fatima Jinnah, 80000 Basic Democrats acted as an electoral college. In 1984, Gen Ziaul Haq used Referendum as a sleight of hand. In keeping with his character and his penchant for taking calculated risks Pervez Musharraf has opted for a far more transparent process, a mixture of 1965 and 1984 with the realities on the ground in 2002. By choosing direct universal franchise over the indirect process of an electoral college, Musharraf has pre-empted democratic protest by reaching into the very basics of democracy. And very intelligently he has put the Nazims and Naib Nazims of the Local Bodies under notice to get off the fence and be counted, using the grassroots rulers as vote musterers rather than being voters only. Everyone and his uncle knows that while the Local Bodies election were fought on a non-party basis, nearly 80% of these elected owe their existence to one party or the other. Once in power in various municipalities, the elected officials have been forced to stay with the “party-less” fiction, according to the laws availing they could be disqualified. Moreover, those who have been elected to the Local Bodies have a vested interest in keeping the system in place. Virtually a District Governor, a Nazim has authentic political power in his area, far more than any MNA/MPA had, or even a Federal/Provincial Minister. Why should he voluntarily give up the new status quo, he has far more power being elected locally than being a small cog in the nation’s capitals. The result has been nothing short of devastating.
