Of caretaker set-ups and elections

Nawaz Sharif has picked fights with every army chief and Imran Khan is too much of a wildcard.

In an ideal world, the sheer amount of sweat and ink wasted on the composition of the caretaker government will be inversely proportionate to its relevance. A caretaker government should be unnoticeable to the point of invisibility, take no bold initiatives and just let events play out — like Misbahul Haq. There is absolutely no need to hire more government workers who invariably belong to the same political party favoured by the rulers and little reason to spend development funds in constituencies that will be up for grabs on May 11.

The caretaker government doesn’t even need to concern itself with the elections; the day-to-day nitty gritty should be handled by the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP). It is up to the ECP to treat the military and its invariable interference like the hostile invasion it is, and in Fakhruddin G Ebrahim, we have a person who has made a career out of being wary of the men in khaki. If needed, the Supreme Court, never shy of picking a fight when retreat would be counselled by conservative minds, can serve as a back-up force.



Pakistan is in such an unprecedented place — a democratic government has served out its term; a caretaker government is being appointed without discarding the Constitution to the garbage heap; we will have two successive elections without a decade-long dictatorial interlude — that it is surprising how easily we are getting distracted by C-plots at the expense of the main storyline. The utterly irrelevant sideshow that is Pervez Musharraf has been sucking in precious media oxygen by announcing yet another return to Pakistan. At this point, no one should believe he will ever come back and face the music for his many crimes but it makes for good, if completely wasteful, copy.

Neither the caretaker government nor Musharraf will be the saviours or destroyers of democracy. They just don’t matter enough. The events that transpire both before and after the elections are dependent on our politicians. The military is not in a position to take overt power and as long as every major political party remains committed to staying independent, it will have no one to usher into power as a proxy either. The PPP has always been too hated by the military, Nawaz Sharif has picked fights with every army chief who has ever crossed his path and Imran Khan is too much of a wildcard.

It is the latter figure who could conceivably hold the key to the survival of democracy after the elections. No one party is going to win enough seats to form a government on its own and if the PTI is able to snag around 40-plus seats, it may not be possible to form a government without the PTI either. If Imran Khan sticks to his long-held position of refusing to form a coalition with both the PPP and the PML-N, we could have a hung parliament. This is where the military could swoop in, most likely by taking advantage of the confusion and the fatigue at the thought of an election mulligan. This is one situation where a bit of ideological and political flexibility would be the mature course for Imran Khan to take.

Then again, maturity is not a quality our politicians aspire to. The PPP has essentially abdicated its responsibility to govern and yet, many of its members voted themselves backdated pay raises and lifetime perks. No matter that handing gifts to themselves is an art perfected by the generals, these are the kind of moves that, however unjustifiably, sour people on democracy and make the military an attractive option.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 22^nd, 2013.