Indispensable or Indefensible?
The President and the country are both at a crossroads, partly because of Pervez Musharraf’s own making in accepting convoluted legal advice complicating the constitutional situation but mostly due to the drastic changes in the geo-political circumstances since 9/11. While the full details of the deadlock on the LFO talks are still to be publicly aired, the crunch really lies in the President being the constitutional Head of State while hanging on to the office of the COAS. There is ample evidence to suggest there is room for compromise on all other issues but a major part of the Opposition bloc has shown no inclination to budge unless the comprehensive package includes the shedding of his Army uniform by the President. The Opposition have shown a penchant for freezing all Parliamentary work by making a violent nuisance of themselves in the Assemblies.
In any democracy the President cannot be the Army Chief concurrently. As long as Pervez Musharraf is COAS, this is not democracy but a continuation of the military regime, to suggest otherwise would be a farce. The democratic institutions may have been put in place but it would be incongruity to suggest that while one man holds power through the barrel of the gun we are a democracy. The gradual democratization process will not be complete until the COAS doffs his uniform. What the Opposition is suggesting is not wrong, theoretically.
Good Governance Versus Populism
Good governance and populism cannot co-exist for long. History is replete with instances of (1) popular leaders failing to give good governance and (2) leaders who give good governance being hardly popular, at least during their lifetimes. While it would be too simplistic to say that popular leaders are not capable of good governance, that is only possible by leaders who are prepared to be unpopular i.e. have the ability to take tough decisions. Sher Shah Suri, who drove the Moghul Emperor Jahangir from his throne, was hardly as popular as the royal potentate he deposed, yet the short five years of reign before he died (and Jahangir was welcomed back by a fickle people as a conquering hero) is quoted as the one rule in the history of the sub-continent that is seen as the best period of South Asian administration. For that matter the two hundred years of British rule till 1947 over India was hardly populist in nature, it was tough but fair and counted as an example of good governance.
If we are to add up the “good governance” scorecard of the military regime uptil Oct 12 there are many more pluses than minuses, if we were to go back further to the days before the President started his Referendum campaign, then those pluses are far more than those visible today. The “Referendum” can be said to be the watershed of the Musharraf Regime; his rule being divided into the period “before Referendum” (BR) and “after Referendum” (AR). On the balance sheet the military regime has done extremely well BR but in public perception it has failed the acid test of credibility AR. While there were some misgivings before the elections as to supporting of favourites, a lot of people who supported Gen Musharraf wholeheartedly have been turned off AR by the goings-on of the last 9 weeks or so. The Oct 12 results dictated a PML(Q)-led coalition in the Centre, an MMA government in NWFP, Balochistan with a “pot-pourri coalition” inclusive of the PML(Q) as a senior partner and PPP-led coalition in Sindh. This master plan was scuttled by the “Fazlur Rehman spanner” that Ms Benazir threw into the works, thereafter the regime’s wise men decided that the PPP did not deserve any democratic consideration. In the process they used the “Patriots” to shoot down the PPP’s aspirations for having their man as PM, they then got carried away and put paid to any PPP hopes to making the government in Sindh. While this may be good in the short run, the compromise choice of Chief Minister, Ali Mohammad Maher, does not excite much confidence in sustaining this coalition rule for any length of time. He may well surprise us by having strength presently not visible on the surface, at the moment he is very much a “puppet on a string”.