Resuing Democracy in Pakistan

Resuing Democracy in Pakistan

By Bhabani Sen Gupta

A ballistic missile of hope burst off at the Supreme Court in Islamabad, on Thursday, December 17, when the full Bench of 17 justices declared unvalid and violative of the Constitution the presidential ordinance known as NRO .The ordinance laid out the basis of the political compromise of 2007 between General Musharaff and Benazir Bhutto for restoration of civilian rule in Pakistan. It was a victory for the millions of Pakistanis who have espoused the cause of democracy but have been denied their cherished political system by the military. The Army, helped and backed by captains of the bureaucracy, has ruled Pakistan for half of the sixtytwo years of the sovereign republic born of the partition of Britain’s Indian empire. Man creates history even as history creates man. The credit for the great boost democracy and the rule of law received on that sunlit December morning goes, of course, to the millions of Pakistanis who kept the flame of democracy alive and flickering even during long sunless spans of military rule. There are, however, two outstanding individuals who laminate the great event of December 17 which may make another military takeover much more difficult than the three Army coups of 1958, 1977 and 1996. One of them if Iftikar Choudhry, chief justice of Pakistan, whose determined fight for an independent judiciary and his final victory have installed him as perhaps the brightest icon of the country’s struggle for democracvy. Chief Justice Choudhury ‘s historic role found rich consummation in his ability to carry the entire Bench with him to deliver the great judgment on December 17. The other luminous icon of democracy in Pakistan is the 87-year old Mubashir Hasan, of Lahore, who filed the petition at the Supreme Court challenging the legality of the National Reconciliation Ordinance and mobilized a team of competent lawyers, headed by Abdul Latif Pirzada, also of Lahore, to plead successfully for the historic verdict. I am just one of the multitude of admorers of Mubashir Hasan whom I met in Lahore first in 1984 and with whom I was able to build a close rapport through the 1990s and down to the early years of the current decade. Mubashir is, for me, a shining symbol of the bravely persistent struggle of Pakistanis for democracy and the Rights of Man( in Pakistan. For me, Mubashir is the symbol of the many qualities of the Pakistani that I have admired and written about--- warmth of heart, r great ability to love and laugh, readiness to reciprocate affection, kindness and loyalty. It was an overwhelming emotional moment for me when, a few months back, I met Mobashir at a book launching event in New Delhi. I went to the meet as soon as I found his name in the morning newspapers as one of the speakers. Five minutes before the appointed Time I saw him enter the auditorium at the Nehru Memorial Library ---an annex to the building some 500 metres to the south of Rashtrapati Bhavan, the president’s palace, designed for the British viceroy by Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens .He was almost exactly the man I stayed with in Lahore in 2000, my last trip to Pakistan. The same tall, slim, smiling. We sat together. The next day I met him for a couple of hours at the ranglow on Curzon Lane, where lives Saida, member of India.s Planning Commission, an erudite, engaging, gracefully non-aging lady who gave up her Canadian citizenship to live and work in India. I knew that the Pakistan People’s Party was born in 1969 at Mubashir’s house in Lahore and that he was finance minister in the First cabinet of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. I also knew that he did not agree with JAB’s handling of the turn of events that ended with the separation of East Pakistan from Pakistan and its incarnation as Bangladesh. Mubashir had told me that he stayed on with ZAB mainly because among the political leaders of Pakistan he alone was committed to the urban and rural poor and the lower middle classes. On one of my visits to Lahore, Mubashir took me around the city’s sprawling slums where lived the poor, and I saw how people of these urban slums loved and respected him. Mubashir used to enlighten me about the inner dynamics of the republic of Pakistan, tell me about the emotional traumas the Pakistanis had gone through, and about the basic contradictions of Pakistani society. He would often talk about the “bleeding sense of betrayal” the people of Pakistan fekt at the three military coups, how the politicians had let down the people, and how convinced he was that the great hiatus between democracy and military dictatorship was the basic fault line of the State and Society of Pakistan. Few Pakistani personalities are known to Indians except in the narrow restricted context of nationalism and religion, and the mutually exclusive relationship between what Kuldip Nayar appropriately described as distant neighours. A recent break in the clogged claustrophobia that inhibits neghbourliness in South Asia was an op-ed page article printed in The Hindu of December 21 written by its correspondent in Islamabad, Ms Nirupama Subramaniam on the Supreme Court drama that ended up with the invalidation of the misbegotten National Reconciliation Ordinance . It is probably the only profile published in the Indian Press of Dr Mubashir Hasan who petitioned the Supreme Court Against the NRO. Rao interviewed Mubashir and her article was wore the headline :” A Long and Mostly Lonely Battle for Reordering Pakistan.” Rao quoted Mubashir as telling her that while he shared the happiness of people of Pakistan and of many other countries with the historic Supreme Court verdict, he knew the political system well enough to doubt if it would lead to a genuine reordering of the country. “The people of Pakistan are extremely happy, so I am happy too,” she quoted Mubashir telling her. “But since I know the reality, I do not entertain the hope that this will stop the state of Pakistan from falling apart.” Mubashir hurried to explain that he believed that when corruption became the System, the state fell apart. Mubashir Hasan is a civil engineer earning his Ph.D from Columbia University. His own life is an example for the people of Pakistan who, in their own way. Have been fighting their battles for democracy and a humane social and economic order. He belongs, as I also do, to the generation in the subcontinent that witnessed the end of the Empire, and the lauuching of our respective republics. However, our political systems carry a lot of the dirt and filth that gathered in the huge belly pf the Empire. India has done relatively well because of its democratic political process built on institutional foundations. It was Pakistan’s misfortune that it lacked strong political institutions and leadership . From the start, power was usurped by the bureaucracy. And even in the 1950s the ruling bureaucracy joined arms with the Army to lord it over the political parties and their leaders. If Mubashir Hasan were a student of history and take a deep look at political history of nations and peoples, he would perhaps be less pessimistic and share the popular jubilation of the Supreme Court verdict of December 21. The nations of Europe took more than a century, fought countless wars including two WQorld Wars in 25 years, while enriching themselves from their worldwide empires before they attained the mature stability of the last sixty years. Besides---and this is a matter of supreme importance--- the Europeans slit themselves into a cluster of countries with small populations compared with the countries of Asia. When Asia changes, half of humanity changes. Even after losing its eastern wing, Pakistan is home to over 168 million people ---the second largest Muslim country in the world after Indonesia--- while Germany and France, the two most populous countries of the continent of Europe, have only 82 and 64 million people .