Preserving our relics

They bestowed democratic veneer to rule of feudal, tribal & business coteries whose nepotism, corruption is legendary.

One of our leading columnists (in another publication) came up, the other day, with a truly apt phrase applicable to our present ruling clique — ‘uninspiring relics’. To this, one could easily add ‘of stunning mediocrity’ with inclinations towards kleptocracy.

Now, it is these uninspiring relics, to whom must be added most of the opposition, who trumpet from the rooftops that they are champions of democracy, placed where they are through the democratic process of ‘free and fair elections’. They have been given the right, they claim, and the permission of the people who voted them in, the larger percentage of them being illiterate and thus subject to assorted types of pressure, to do as and how they will with whatever remains of the assets of a bankrupt country.

As to ‘free and fair’, well, our present post-election scenario has gone some way towards demonstrating that sitting in our assemblies, voted in by those who chose to vote, are some who in no way can fit into the ‘free and fair’ category. They are where they are, through fraud and cheating. Elections since 1988 have but entrenched the status quo. They have bestowed a democratic veneer to the rule of feudal, tribal and business coteries whose nepotism and corruption is legendary. Hence, the present relics who are ready, willing and deluded into believing that they are able to broker deals with terrorists, who have little intention or the will to stem the seemingly unstoppable descent into political and cultural bankruptcy.

It is a fallacy to assume that elections make democracy. They do not. What constitutes democracy is the rule of law and order, democratic behaviour which is to obey and conform to the law, democratic laws not outmoded laws that negate human rights, tolerance, equity and the placing of collective needs far above personal gain. We have never had true democracy, down the decades we have suffered and even condoned a wicked travesty.

Military interventions, as is universally acknowledged, have done their damage. They have aided in the further pollution of the system. Each military general has used the politicians to keep himself in place, and the politicians, many of them now with us, have flocked into the quasi-democratic governments and assemblies of the generals, becoming their willing tools purely in the interests of pelf and futile power. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, ‘father’ of Pakistan’s democracy, set the trend.

With or without constitutional amendments, the country has drifted seamlessly from presidential to prime ministerial rule. Asif Ali Zardari, who, since 1988, has been on and off the stage, stepped with ease into Pervez Musharraf’s shoes and, despite his constitutional ‘sacrifices’, perpetuated presidential rule. Now we have the third coming of Mian Nawaz Sharif, an even more genuine relic dating back to Ziaul Haq’s horribly disastrous rule, presiding over the land in prime ministerial form, heading the uninspiring relics. His performance in Washington last month can hardly be qualified as inspiring. Nor can his second stint in the same job, when he juggled with religion attempting to justify totalitarianism.

To end with Peter Ustinov’s view of democracy: “The word democracy has been used and abused beyond belief. First, it was used by the Greeks to describe what they were doing naturally and to lend some rules to a natural penchant for argument. Then it was applied to the Icelandic parliament which shouted from rock to crevice separating government from opposition. Not a bad idea.

“Magna Carta, the French revolution, Tom Paine and the American rediscovery of democracy followed, and finally the word was used and abused as a way of describing every repressive government in the world … ”.

Hypocritical to the core, whatever is done in Pakistan, in and out of parliament, be it manifestly wrong, is said to have been done to ‘save’ democracy. Honourable democrats indeed!

Published in The Express Tribune, November 2^nd, 2013.

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