Pakistan is in no danger of settling down to some form of political stability any time soon, but cross-party consensus on a constitutional reform package this year – and two years of a democratically elected government – show that the rules of the political game are becoming established.
The ruling Pakistan People’s Party has defied all the frequent predictions of its demise, as has President Asif Zardari, who has toughed out the efforts of his many enemies to oust him. The Pakistan People’s Party has reached out to other political parties, while the main opposition party, the Pakistan Muslim League-N of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, has not allied itself with a military establishment that seemed at times determined to force a change in government. The military has ruled Pakistan for most of its existence.
But just when party politics and even
civil-military relations seemed a little more settled, along came another institutional confrontation: an outright clash between the judiciary and the government of President Asif Zardari, with the president very much in the chief justice’s sights.
Pakistan is plagued by three crises: political convulsions, violent extremism and an economy in a nose dive. The political challenge is most clearly visible in the confrontation between the judiciary and the executive, more particularly Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry’s determination to re-open old corruption charges against President Zardari and some of his cronies, and the government’s resolve to resist the move.
The judiciary is interfering in a whole series of issues often considered the realm of the executive. Some leading lawyers believe that the judiciary has over-stepped its sphere, pushing Pakistani politics into an unpredictable new era.
“We have a very unsatisfactory bunch of politicians,” says Asma Jahangir, chairperson of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. “The system can throw out corrupt politicians but it can’t throw out judges.”
There is also trouble brewing on the streets. In April, rioting broke out in Abbottabad, a town in the north-west, over the seemingly innocuous issue of renaming the North-West Frontier province, leaving several people dead – disturbances said to have been encouraged by an opposition political party. It seemed to show that deep grievances lurk below the surface, which could erupt on even a minor provocation.
There have also been riots in several cities in the dominant Punjab province this year over scheduled electricity stoppages, due to the chronic shortage of generation capacity – outages that plague city and countryside, often for 12 hours or more a day, forcing industry to shut down. In March, there were violent protests on the edge of Islamabad over a steep rise in the price of public transport.
There is to be further government belt-tightening this year to meet the terms of IMF lending, which will raise prices further.
It could be a long hot summer in Pakistan.
POLITICAL CLASSES
“The politicians appear to be ineffective or not interested in coping with the anarchic situation developing in parts of the country. In fact, the opposition want anarchy, to put the government under pressure,” says Hasan-Askari Rizvi, a political analyst based in the eastern city of Lahore and author of Military, State, and Society in Pakistan. “The real challenges are extra-parliamentary.”
The politicians, especially the ruling Pakistan People’s Party, spent a lot of energy congratulating themselves over the passage of the “historic” 18th amendment to the constitution, which restored the parliamentary form of government to the country, from the presidential variety favoured by Pakistan’s many military rulers.
It also devolved a long list of powers from the centre to the four provincial governments, addressing long-standing complaints.
But the constitutional reform dared not touch the Islamic provisions introduced during the 1980s under Islamist military ruler Zia-ul-Haq. Even so, the fact that all the political parties in parliament were able to sit down and agree on around 100 amendments to the constitution was a strong signal that Pakistan’s political system is able to deliver.
In the 1990s, the democratically elected governments fell every two or three years, none coming close to completing their terms, with the corresponding gyrations in government policy and staffing of the bureaucracy. Each sacking of the government was instigated by the military, culminating in the straight-out coup of 1999. The constitutional reform should make military intervention more difficult.
But critics say that Pakistan’s difficulties are much more basic than fixing the political system. Rather they are about dealing with the everyday problems of ordinary people that constitutional reform does nothing to address.
“Another military intervention can only be stopped if there is good governance,” says Ejaz-ul-Haq, an opposition politician and son of the 1980s military dictator. “Today we have the worst governance.”
Hardly anyone is predicting another coup any time soon, as the military is pre-occupied with fighting an insurgency. The current government was forced to withdraw subsidies, on goods such as petrol, electricity and basic food items that had been used by the military-led regime of Pervez Musharraf, who ran Pakistan from 1999 to 2008, to keep necessities affordable.
While it does seem possible that the current government will see out its five-year term, few would bet on it.