We know how to fight for democracy: Zardari

[Aeon]

We know how to fight for democracy: Zardari
Saturday, 02 Oct, 2010

BADIN: President Asif Ali Zardari has said the government has the mandate of 170 million people and there are not many ‘brave hearts’ who can destabilise or remove it.

Addressing a gathering at the Circuit House here at a function held on Friday to mark the balloting of Benazir Smart Waseela-i-Haq card, he said that being a large party, the PPP was working to strengthen democracy as envisioned by Benazir Bhutto.“We are not afraid of anyone and the government will complete its tenure,” the president said.

“We know how to fight and die for the sake of democracy. We do people’s politics and will continue to serve the masses.”

He said the government was facing a lot of problems because of devastating floods, but “we will not rest till the rehabilitation of every affected person”.

“I wanted to celebrate Eid with flood-affected people in Badin, but could not come because of inclement weather,” the president said.

He said the Smart Cards of Waseela Haq Benazir Support Programme would help the holder during the lifetime and after his death his heir would get an insurance benefit of Rs100,000.

The president gave Rs100,000 cheques to 12 women. He later visited a relief camp and distributed Watan Cards among eight affected people.

He also said that the rich who owned large property would have to pay taxes.

National Assembly Speaker Dr Fehmida Mirza who welcomed the president, said the country was moving ahead on the democratic path.

Because of President Zardari, she said, parliament had become independent and strong institution.

She said the president had protected the rights of women who had the opportunity now to enter parliament and almost all other institutions.

The chairperson of the Benazir Income Support Programme, Ms Farzana Raja, said that more than 300 million people had benefited from the programme so far.

 

[muse]

Not afraid on anyone, eh? For "democracy", eh? Reality is Pakistani politics are not about democracy, neither sadly, is Pakistani governance - on the other hand what "democracy" is, is a a excuse - an excuse for poor governance, for gross miscarriages of justices, for a culture of kleptocracy, for the maintenance of a status quo wherein if one is educated or has earned technical prowess, one must think seriously of a life away from Pakistan.

If readers will think that I think "democracy" as understood in Pakistan, is a net loss - well... yes, it is deviance, just no damn good!

 

[SekrutYakhni]

Not afraid on anyone, eh? For "democracy", eh? Reality is Pakistani politics are not about democracy, neither sadly, is Pakistani governance - on the other hand what "democracy" is, is a a excuse - an excuse for poor governance, for gross miscarriages of justices, for a culture of kleptocracy, for the maintenance of a status quo wherein if one is educated or has earned technical prowess, one must think seriously of a life away from Pakistan.

If readers will think that I think "democracy" as understood in Pakistan, is a net loss - well... yes, it is deviance, just no damn good!

Dictator Musharaf was the part of status quo.

 

[SekrutYakhni]

The moment he created his political jokers with military backing, status quo knocked the doors of the houses.

 

[muse]

No doubt, but I don't think he saw himself in the same light, did not think of himself, did not think of his program in the same way as the politicians do - call him "dictator" call him anything that pleases you, but you can't hide from the fact that the Pakistani economy doubled, that Pakistani GDP more than doubled.

See, Saad, contrary to common wisdom, Pakistan is country that can double it's economy every 6 to 7 years, so long as there is political peace and economic policies that make sense, no more "experiments" and Musharraf understood that and acted on that understanding, that's why so much capital came to Pakistan at last someone in power to trust, someone interested in the Pakistani economy, not his own - and also look at something that Musharraf did, his book, really you may notg at this point realize how important, how in the spirit of genuine democracy was this effort, how terrible modern and for Pakistan, novel, it was for a leader to make his taxes, his entire financial holdings known - I think much gets lost when discussing Musharraf - Democracy can never mean, just "voting" - we have "democracy" now, with the three pillars but the armed forces at each others throats, how can that ever be "democracy"?

 

[muse]

Forum readers are invited to read the piece below, Cyril is sold on the man, I though will bet Mr. Zardari has just two options, produce for the American or produce for Pakistan, both options will get him killed, one sooner, the other later :




Inside the mind of Zardari
By Cyril Almeida
Friday, 01 Oct, 2010


A few ministers sacked or reshuffled, a few ministries read the riot act, a few unpalatable advisers jettisoned or nudged off centre stage, some hard decisions on the economy, some smart decisions about handling the courts, and voila! The sense of crisis would lift, the PPP’s fortunes would rise once again, and the party could arrive in election season at the end of 2012 with a fighting chance.

Conversely, do nothing, at least nothing good, and Zardari and his government will eventually be chewed up and spat out by the forces agitating, covertly and overtly, to remove them. But nothing is precisely what Zardari has chosen to do. Why? Why would Zardari choose to be frogmarched towards an increasingly certain ouster instead of doing what’s necessary to earn a reprieve and improve his party’s prospects at the next election?

The popular answer: because Zardari is self-destructive, because he is hardwired to pick the worst among available options, because Zardari will be Zardari, if you will.

But the popular answer isn’t necessarily the right one. In fact, unless you possess a pathological hatred for Zardari, the popular answer is really quite silly. (The man has proved to be more shrewd than many thought possible, something even his opponents acknowledge, if only in private.)

So let’s roam through the mind of the regent of the PPP and try and figure out what his game could be.

First: the rejection of personal culpability. Pakistan’s problems are systemic and are beyond the fixing of any one person or single government, Zardari must be telling himself. In this he would, to a large extent, be correct. There were economic problems before Zardari’s government and there will be economic problems after this government. There was militancy before and there will be militancy afterwards. The state was on the decline before and it will be on the decline after this government.

So if you’re Zardari, you believe that success of only the most limited kind is possible. (For the rest of us who aren’t Zardari, it’s obvious that lowering self-expectations is a convenient way of deflecting blame when nothing is achieved.)

Second, the appetite for power is undiminished. The early predictions of this being a one-shot game, that Zardari and his ribald bunch of misfits wanted to grab as much as they could as quickly as they could before decamping, permanently, to safer, more comfortable shores, has proved wrong. Zardari is addicted to politics, loves a scrappy fight and has ideas about doing this all over again.

Third, the base has to be safeguarded. The core PPP voter is an odd creature, doggedly sticking with a party that has spent more time out of power than in. But, and this is perhaps key to everything, the diehard jiyala can and does suffer from disillusionment and disaffection.

The few times the PPP has been in power, it has proved to be a governance disaster, eliciting groans from even the most faithful of party supporters. Nothing seems to turn the PPP voter off the party more than a stint in power for the party. This time has been no different and the alarm bells are ringing across the country.

The several PPP by-election victories offer little comfort: by-polls are almost always about local personalities and issues. At the next national election, if part of an orderly and on-time transfer of power, the wave of discontent could well decimate the PPP.

Now, if that’s the scenario you’re faced with as Asif Zardari, then an unconstitutional ouster by the unhappy uniform, a quasi-constitutional ouster by the hostile robe or a forced changed by the opportunist opposition doesn’t seem so bad, does it?

Two and half years into a five-year term, the PPP has been exposed as wretchedly incompetent and with little appetite or capacity to even try and fix things. Which means the most democratic route — a peaceful transition of power at a preordained time — now offers little hope to Zardari’s PPP.

In a delicious paradox, the one thing that does offer Zardari and his PPP hope for a brighter electoral future is the very group trying to undermine them: Zardari’s enemies.

If those enemies succeed in bringing down this government, they will get the back up of the disaffected-at-the-moment PPP base. Anger over yet another PPP government dismissed before its time will smoulder among the party’s base. The establishment will never let the PPP rule, the jiyala will fume. The Punjabi overlord will do whatever it takes to keep the smaller guys out, the hardcore PPP supporter will rage. The upshot? The PPP base will be secure once again.

Success the regular, principled, democratic way makes onerous demands: fix the economy, right governance failures, re-establish the state’s writ in a strife-torn country. But that would test even the ablest of administrators and the most towering of statesmen, personalities the PPP doesn’t exactly have a surfeit of.

Success the lowest-common-denominator way is more straightforward: trigger the visceral, emotional reactions of the average PPP voter. Make that voter feel like it’s the PPP against the world, remind him that he has more to fear from other powers than to gain from the PPP, and he is likely to stick by you.

Not convinced? There is a precedent. Nawaz Sharif’s ‘I-will-not-take-dictation’ speech led to his ouster in 1993 and handed an electoral victory to the PPP. To the uninitiated, Sharif’s defiance of GIK may appear to have been an unmitigated failure. After all, Sharif lost his government and his bitter enemy was returned to power. In fact, it was a strategic success.

That speech, and his robust opposition to the PPP government over the next three years, firmly installed Sharif in the mind of the Punjabi voter as someone the voter could trust as his leader. After all, here was a politician who promised to never ‘take dictation’, the kind of man to give macho, nationalistic Punjabis goose bumps. Eventually, Sharif stormed back to power with his famous ‘heavy mandate’ in 1997.

If gambling on his and his party’s premature ouster is in fact Zardari’s plan now, it’s unlikely to have been the plan from the beginning. But as pressure on his government has grown, as the wolves have closed in and the vultures circled, Zardari’s thinking may have veered towards the more hardball — less salutary, but with better chances of success, given the circumstances.

Could ostensibly self-defeating, stupid defiance really be shrewd strategic defiance? Faced with the likelihood of a devastating knockout in a fair-and-square fight at the polls, Zardari could be opting for a TKO. That way, he and his party can bounce back somewhere down the road, buoyed by an angry PPP base which will have forgotten about the party’s governance troubles.

Still think Zardari is crazy? Crazy like a fox perhaps.

 

[fatman17]

ANALYSIS: Is the party over?

—Salman Tarik Kureshi

The moderate right is programmatically clear and is divided at present only because of personality issues between Nawaz Sharif and others who claim the Muslim League label. But the PPP drifts rudderless in ideological darkness

I had suggested in these pages last week that the two-alliance political polarity slowly emerging in Pakistan was already acquiring its right wing, centred around the PML-N, but that its left wing was still to evolve. Some friends have disagreed. What about the PPP, they say. Its current failures notwithstanding, is that not the core entity for culturally liberal, socially egalitarian democrats?

In today’s piece, I would like to revisit certain points in the PPP’s history and show how it has lost its social democratic compass, as it sails towards political irrelevance.

Initially formed at the residence of J A Rahim in Karachi, the PPP was officially launched at a convention at the Pak Tea House, Lahore, in November 1967. The party was a child of the 1960s — a decade known the world over for its non-conformist, anti-establishment upsurge and its passion for social justice. Vigorous espousal of democratic, pro-poor values caused the PPP to emerge strongly in the assemblies and amongst the hungry, justice-seeking people at large.

Some contended that the PPP was in fact an establishment ploy, with a temporarily out-of-work politician (the late Mr Bhutto) mouthing radical democratic and socialist slogans only to deceive the masses. Well, whatever his private promptings, the objective actions of Mr Bhutto in power included fathering a national constitution, thereby placing himself alongside such illustrious democratic figures as Thomas Jefferson, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Jawaharlal Nehru and Tunku Abdur Rahman. As regards his socialist credentials, we have the evidence of the four waves of nationalisation carried out by his government. Many of course contend that these nationalisations destroyed the backbone of the economy; the fact is that at the time socialism-without-nationalisation would have been something of an oxymoron.

But, as members of our urban elite never tire of arguing, the PPP is actually a feudal party and Mr Bhutto and other party leaders were feudal lords who hated capitalist material progress. Now, it is true that the Bhuttos were a land-owning family. The fact is that this ‘feudal’ government carried out not one but two waves of land reforms, forcing the landed classes to seek all kinds of subterfuges to cling to some portion of their holdings. It was the pseudo-Islamic propaganda of the middle class General Ziaul Haq that led to the reversal of the land reforms. Less than a dozen years after the PPP’s creation, its charismatic founder was executed on the orders of this usurper.

In 1986, a courageous ray of light shone out against the suffocating darkness of the Zia regime. Benazir Bhutto landed at Lahore to one of the biggest and most tumultuous welcomes ever accorded to anyone until then. She then flew down to Karachi, to the mammoth, million-plus procession — the greatest this city had ever seen — that welcomed her return. It was dark as the procession turned from Nursery into Shahrah-e-Quaideen, but someone in a small jeep in front of the truck in which she rode was shining a spotlight towards her. Her face seemed almost haloed there — she was a fairy princess, defying an evil sorcerer.

In 1988, Zia died and she led her party into the elections that followed.

There is a point about the selection of PPP candidates that went into this election that bears note. Feeling (correctly) that the establishment would shamelessly stack the cards against them, the First Couple of the PPP sought to award party tickets to “sure winners” in the various constituencies, whether these were PPP loyalists or not. This brought on board a crowd of opportunists and even some former functionaries of the Zia regime.

The PPP was successful on 32 percent of the seats polled, making it the largest single party in parliament. But this compared poorly with its earlier performances. In 1970, the PPP had won 81 seats, a whopping 60 percent of the West Pakistan seats. In that election, this party swept Punjab, gaining 62 of the province’s 82 NA seats — an incredible 76 percent. By contrast, in 1988, the PPP’s tally in the largest province was only 29 percent of the 150 Punjab seats. Where the PPP had earlier swept the heavily populated GT Road districts, doing much less well in the comparatively backward feudal domains of the Seraiki belt, the 1988 elections showed an exact reversal. Clearly, the PPP had lost its former vote bank in the heavily populated GT Road belt of Punjab and picked up in the feudal south and west. Thus, the “sure winners” had failed to win and the party had been driven out of its former strongholds into the rural hinterland.

This was also the time Benazir made her first set of ‘deals’ with the establishment and was accepted as prime minister. Whether it was the constraints imposed by her ‘deal’ or inadequate executive competence or alleged corruption, her government accomplished very little in its two abbreviated terms in office. She proceeded into exile again.

But we in this country are desperately short of heroes of any gender. Bibi possessed both charisma and personal courage in extraordinary measure and, exiled again, she very quickly regained her status as the ‘People’s Princess’. After making what this writer considered an entirely gratuitous set of ‘deals’ that included the notorious NRO, she returned to Pakistan. To extraordinary popular acclamation. To bombs. And bullets. And death.

Her assassination was an event of fearful magnitude. The people mourned immensely. It was a savage grief, a violent commemoration. Fire and smoke devoured the peace in our cities, an enormous suttee in reverse. The nation, in general, and her party in particular, have been rendered bereft of credible leadership.

To return to our starting point, the moderate right is programmatically clear and is divided at present only because of personality issues between Nawaz Sharif and others who claim the Muslim League label. But the PPP drifts rudderless in ideological darkness. Dominated by a handful of cronies loyal to the party leader and an elite clutch of smart set cosmopolitans, buoyed up on a know-nothing mass of country squires whose ‘feudal’ label sits incongruously, this has ceased to be a party of the democratic left. It is nostalgia and an absence of alternatives that keeps liberals like Raza Rabbani, Aitzaz Ahsan, Sherry Rehman, Kamal Azfar, etc, clinging to this derelict political hulk.

The writer is a marketing consultant based in Karachi. He is also a poet

 

[muse]

Nawaz and company may be the bomb for the right wing in the Poon-jab, but I don't think it's the totality of Pakistan -- and, I don't know what the so called "right wing" is other than the islamists.

 

[muse]

We have long argued that Westminster on the Indus is a deviant aberrant understanding of "Democracy" -- we have argued that Pakistan need a system of governance (a Pakistani system, a "democracy" informed by not only universal ideas, aspirations and goals but also by Pakistan's unique history, unique culture and unique context, a system that is a Means, and not as at present, a End)

The editorial below, appearing in today's Daily Times Newspaper, is important, and readers should review it critically -- our hope is to have readers, in particular our Pakistani readers to consider seriously, if it will be possible to continue to disregard reality, to disregard, context, to disregard the idea that governance is about delivering government services to society and that in the thinking of men, this is the primary criteria and no other can replace it -- after all, if in the same way as we argue that Communists are directly related to the failure of Communism, why is that we shall not employ the same for the failure of this supplanted so called Westminster Democracy in Pakistan?



EDITORIAL: Democracy under threat

President Zardari has said that democracy in Pakistan is strong enough to protect itself. How Mr Zardari has come to this conclusion is not quite clear. He also said that the PPP government “has been formed by the people, who are ready to foil any conspiracy against the democratic government”. The president’s overconfidence in his party and government shows that either Mr Zardari is oblivious of the ground realities or he is pretending that all is rosy in his Garden of Eden. Perhaps the president needs a reality check.

There is no question that democracy is better than dictatorship. A democratic system gives representative government to the people, in recognition of their status as sovereign. It negates hereditary chieftainship, monarchy and autocracy and places the people centre-stage. Democracy is the only form of governance that represents the people’s will and opens the doors to accompanying benefits like freedom of expression, etc. When a party gets a mandate from the people, its government is expected to work for the welfare of the people but if it fails to deliver, it is voted out in the next elections. Democracy in itself and by itself is not an answer to all our problems; the underlying assumption, however, is that with each successive exercise of the people’s right to choose, leadership gets better and maturer. Albeit in power more as exception than the rule, democratic governments nevertheless have not done justice by the system. This government came to power after a long and hard struggle for democracy, but is increasingly a disappointment even to its supporters. The performance of the PPP-led government may end up giving a bad name to democracy and there are fears that if it continues in its merry ways, democracy as a system will be the eventual loser.

Mr Zardari has recently been bandying about terms such as ‘political actors’ and ‘political orphans’. The political ‘actors’ in this case are the agenda-driven right-wing forces, including some notable parts of the media, while the ‘orphans’ are partly at least an allusion to Musharraf’s former supporters and partly those who are waiting for the ‘angels’ to oust this government but have not found much support for the moment. Whether they succeed or not, the narrow focus of the president is ignoring a grim reality, i.e. there is also a considerable portion of the populace that is disillusioned with the incumbent democratic dispensation and wants a change in its conditions of life. This dissatisfaction with the government is partly owed to Musharraf’s legacy and partly the mismanagement and absence of delivery of the current government. Musharraf did leave behind a plethora of problems but the government has been unable in two and a half years to make things better or at least give some indication that it is on the way to making things better.

The impatience of the electorate also reflects the mindset of the people because of numerous military dictatorships and the subsequent political vacuum created in the absence of democracy. Most Pakistanis do not give enough importance to democracy. This government’s lack of delivery has further alienated large sections of the people from the otherwise desirable idea of democracy. The reasons for this inability to satisfy its supporters, constituents, and the broader public are rooted in cronyism and corruption — and the two often go hand in hand. The danger now is that this could lead to the downfall of not just this government but democracy as a whole. Instead of being complacent, Mr Zardari and the government need to wake up to the imminent threat that is looming like a dark cloud over our heads for quite some time now. The so-called ‘democrats’ may themselves end up being seen as a danger to the institution of democracy. If autocratic rule does make a comeback, we run the risk of isolation worldwide. It will be the biggest tragedy for Pakistan if democracy is lost because of the inadequacies of our democratic leaders

 

[Jungibaaz]

I am soooo gonna kill him

 

[Perceptron]

I read an interesting article a few days back ; It looks quite familiar to the dilemma Pakistan is in currently.

Democracy no remedy for ‘failed states’

Since the 1990s, the Fund for Peace, an American non-profit research organization has been publishing a “failed states" index that measures the performance of sovereign governments around the world. Some attributes of failed states include rising demographic pressures, the massive movement of refugees and internally displaced persons, hostile relations between ruling factions, poverty and underdevelopment, the erosion of state legitimacy, and foreign intervention in internal affairs.

The term suggested a new basis for comparison between states that did not depend exclusively on a state’s progress towards democracy. States with free elections and a mechanism for the transfer of power did not necessarily do well on the Failed States Index. A good example is Somalia which ranks first among failed states even though it has a newly elected president and a parliament that supposedly convenes on a regular basis. Somalia’s state institutions are crumbling, in part due to a civil war that is tearing up the country.

Iraq is another failed state. It ranks sixth among 177 states, according to a report published by Foreign Policy, and third among Arab states, preceded only by Somalia and Sudan. The reason for this is the destruction of Iraq’s public institutions. Following the US invasion in 2003, Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, dissolved the military and state institutions, despite warnings against such a move by several American research institutes. The destruction of Iraq's state insitutions under the Bush Administration is a problem which not even democratic elections have managed to solve.

And then there’s Pakistan. Even though Pakistan’s opposition has managed to overthrow Pervez Musharraf’s military dictatorship and establish a democracy, their country continues to bear the heavy burden of a failed, corrupt state, a fact which has been embarrassingly exposed by Pakistan’s failure to deal with the devastating floods that have killed and displaced millions.


Mexico also witnessed a transformation from within the regime which, after 70 years in power, introduced democratic reforms and lost power in an election. The state, however, is still plagued by widespread corruption and bribery. It has had to dismiss around 10 percent of its police force for their links to organized crime.

Then we come to Egypt. Egypt ranks 40th on the failed state index. The first 35 states are considered to be in the most precarious position. States ranking 36th to 137th are considered slightly better off though still in danger.

Egypt has seen an unprecedented decline in the performance of its public institutions over the past 30 years. Sectarian tensions have been on the rise and the rule of law is in becoming increasingly absent. Egypt will see the worst elections in its modern history this November, as fraud and violence are expected to be rampant.

Democratic reforms in Egypt will be meaningless if the country moves up four places into the red-alert area of the index. Experts predict that failed states will never be able to become successful so long as they remain high on the index.

Throughout its history, Egypt has never had a genuinely democratic regime, not as a monarchy or a republic. The Eastern European experience has taught us that a successful transition to democracy requires strong institutions, including prestigious universities, good hospitals and cultural and artistic institutes.

Many emerging democracies have been held back by failing state institutions. If power succession becomes a reality in Egypt, we may likely secure a place among failed states. Serious reform--political and institutional--is required, which will not be achieved simply by the staging of angry protests.

 

[prototype]

democracy and Pakistan....when was Pakistan a democracy

 

[muse]

Perception


It's not whether or not "Democracy" is a "remedy" -- the issue at hand is what are the ideas that inform "Democracy as a tool and method of governance", it is the "content" of that democracy.

In most of the world, "Democracy" other than representative government, it is about the delivery of government services in a efficient, transparent manner, it is about limiting power and most importantly, it's about peaceful transfers of power.

None of these are present in the Westminster on the Indus -- now, lets take a slight turn, what if this PPP government had a done a bang up super job of delivering government services, that it had the net effect of increasing the reach and depth of government in society -- We would have to ask what enabled that and why has it not been possible thus far, EVER - Will we have been too far off the mark to ask this?

 

[huzihaidao12]

Not afraid on anyone, eh? For "democracy", eh? Reality is Pakistani politics are not about democracy, neither sadly, is Pakistani governance - on the other hand what "democracy" is, is a a excuse - an excuse for poor governance, for gross miscarriages of justices, for a culture of kleptocracy, for the maintenance of a status quo wherein if one is educated or has earned technical prowess, one must think seriously of a life away from Pakistan.

If readers will think that I think "democracy" as understood in Pakistan, is a net loss - well... yes, it is deviance, just no damn good!

Realism, the good, the true needs of Pakistan. If it is India,that will have a crisis because the biggest the role of democracy is to make people "believe in democracy", so bring a stable society, if it is India will have a big problem, however, Pakistan is almost nothing more to lose(sharp, sorry). So that, it was a good opportunity for bottoming out. Pakistan has so many wounds, the need is a realistic perception, I did not say to give up democracy, there are many forms of democracy, I will look forward to seeing the efficiency of democracy in Pakistan, which is a good reference for China.

 

[Perceptron]

democracy and Pakistan....when was Pakistan a democracy

Oh didn't you know, for about 3/7ths since Independence ; That's like in a week, you can celebrate 4 Days of Military rule in Pakistan, but heck, the rest of the 3 Days we will function as a Democracy, no matter what.