Economy is important, said one smart, young economist. Good governance is crucial, chimed in another ivy-league-returned professional. Efficient, sound policy-making, added another. And so it went on and on.
NB: None of these highly-educated professionals, as others who express their frustration at where the situation stands, is anti-democracy. Prof Rasul Bakhsh Rais, who writes for this paper is not only a fine political scientist, but was passionate about getting rid of former General-President Pervez Musharraf. He wrote for me then and I recall having occasional disagreement with him on where the lawyers’ movement was going or what it eventually might lead to, as it did.
Today, Dr Rais is a disappointed man. And yet, when he says “The promised democracy is nowhere to be found”, he is not fulminating against democracy. His expectations have gone bad.
But that’s the point. What do we expect from democracy? In the final scene of the play, when Macbeth is facing Macduff and the latter tells him that he was untimely ripped from his mother’s womb, Macbeth talks of the witches as the juggling fiends “That keep the word of promise to our ear,/ And break it to our hope.”
The question is: who is breaking the promise of democracy to our hope? Is democracy an elixir which, administered, will take us back to the state of innocence? If that be it then we have got the concept totally wrong. Democracy evolves from within a body-politic; it doesn’t descend from outside.
But let’s grant one point to those arguing for streamlining state and society before democracy can work. They can rely on J S Mill’s argument in his essay On Liberty: “Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. Until then, there is nothing for them but implicit obedience to an Akbar or a Charlemagne, if they are so fortunate as to find one.”
Without cavilling at the imperial overtones in this argument, the interesting part here is “if they are so fortunate as to find one”. Who would guarantee that? In this country, we have seen strongmen come in and while they entrenched themselves, on Mill’s touchstone, none proved to be an Akbar or a Charlemagne.
But fast forward to 1968 with Samuel Huntington’s Political Order in Changing Societies: He argued for order and maintained that the concept was “independent of the question of whether that order was democratic, authoritarian, socialist, or free-market”. First and foremost, a government must be able to govern. He famously advocated the presence of strongmen (Ayub Khan included in the list) in the run-up to the stage where developing societies have learned the “art of associating”.
The problem, however, is both simple and complex. If we assume, for the sake of the argument and leaving aside other variables, that there is to be a gestation period before we get to democracy – one that would not frustrate our expectations – then, in theory, we need to find the strongman who can do two things: be honest in developing institutions and creating harmony among their working; and, while using his unchallenged power in the first phase to clean up and harmonise the functioning of state and society, to begin to submit himself to the purview of the very institutions he has created.
Possible? No. The question, as posited, relies on a very simple model and does not even bring in the bewildering array of variables which, singly and in tandem, could frustrate any such attempt, even if we WERE to find such a person.
Plot spoiler: There’s nothing easy or neat or clean about democracy – and definitely not in a fractured society. Political governments here have to reconcile conflicting interests and their job is neither easy nor enviable. And the society they have to deal with, and of which they are a part, does not comprise angels. Incidentally, neither does democracy always deliver good results, recent US elections being a case in point. Corollary: let the system work. There is no Eden.
Published in The Express Tribune, November 8th, 2010.
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