Democracy & the fake degrees hullabaloo

ISLAMABAD: This is with reference to Rubina Saigol’s “Democracy” (July 7). I commend the author for putting things into perspective. However, it ought to be remembered that it’s quite common to malign civilian and elected governments by terming them “non-democratic”. Interestingly, this adjective is not used for the dictatorial regimes in our general discourse.

Popularly-elected regimes are almost always maligned in the public sphere and usually this is done through the use of allegations which are often not true. The sudden rise in the number of cases of fake degrees is another example. Ironically, most of these (fake) degrees holders were there in the last parliament, and some of them were with the king’s party. Nothing happened to them then. The judiciary did nothing and in fact those holding madrassah diplomas (‘sanads’) had their qualifications equated to university degrees.

More interesting is the fact that the class raising most of the noise against “corrupt”, “morally bankrupt”, “fake degree holders” and “non-democratic” elected people is the one that normally does not vote. The people who usually turn out in large numbers to vote — rural Pakistanis or the urban lower middle class — do not consider these issues to be of vital importance.

It’s high time we think about how we want democracy to evolve in our country.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 10^th, 2010.