Preserving parliament

The president is quite evidently not a happy man. In Islamabad, he has spoken of fresh conspiracies against him and the system, emphasising a threat to parliament. Asif Ali Zardari had made similar warnings months ago. This time he does not seem quite as paranoid as he did then. As the president indicated, a new bid appears to be on to oust him, and possibly even dismantle parliament. As he has stated, the question of the fake degrees could be an attempt to shake up the system and discredit parliament.  It is certainly worth considering why the issue has come up now with so much force and fury years after the 2008 electoral process was completed. Our view on this is that while the degree requirement is unnecessary, especially in a country with as low literacy levels as Pakistan, when the law was on the books it should have been followed. If the argument is that it was put in place by a dictator then the right course should have been to not participate, rather than get a degree through fraudulent means — the latter is nothing more than playing with the trust reposed by voters. Having said that, this should not mean that a mid-term election be held or that parliament itself be threatened and that is where one will have to support what the president is saying. Parliament will complete its five year term and that no one can undermine the will of people, he and his aides must at least privately acknowledge that like torrents created by a flash flood, many currents now seem to be gathering momentum and possibly threatening to sweep away the exiting set-up.

There are multiple indications of this. The chief opposition leader Mian Nawaz Sharif has delivered what counts as his fiercest diatribe against the government, stating in Lahore that the appointment of ‘undeserving’ persons to key posts and interventions in judicial working presented grave problems.  The Lahore High Court has said the government must stop the drone attacks and the SCBA has warned it may take the law minister to court on charges of doling out money to buy over lawyers. The omens are not good. We have seen such events before in our country. We have also seen the chaos they lead to, disrupting democracy and pushing us further down the ladder towards a pit of instability. Pakistan has, during its 63 years of existence, seen many periods of undemocratic rule. We see the results before us today in the form of an increasingly anarchic society, the terrifying growth within it of extremism and the increasing breakdown of order.

No matter how flawed our democracy, how inadequate our legislators, the fact is, as Mr Zardari stressed, they have been chosen by the people. No one has the right to intervene in this decision. What is of paramount importance is that, rather than creating the uncertainty that has proved so damaging in the past, the law of the land be adhered to. The broader principle of protecting democracy and all that it stands for must also come into play. We are now talking of the very survival of Pakistan. Weakened by war, rated as among the world’s top 10 failed states, ridden by corruption and by internal turmoil, there is a limit to how much further battering it can take; how many storms it can withstand. These factors make it essential that the system laid out in the Constitution be adhered to and no changes made that go beyond what the document states.

It appears some elements had hoped that in response to mounting pressure the president would step down. He has made it quite clear he has no intention of doing so and that he is, as head of state, determined also to keep Parliament afloat. For all of us it is important it survive its five-year term and set in place a badly-needed tradition which genuinely allows people to choose their governments and removes from the equation the external forces that have too often tried to muscle their way in.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 2^nd, 2010.