In Pakistan it146;s the army, stupid

The re-election of General Pervez Musharraf by a truncated electoral college, where opposition MPs had either resigned or boycotted the election...

The re-election of General Pervez Musharraf by a truncated electoral college, where opposition MPs had either resigned or boycotted the election, means different things to different quarters. To America and the Pakistan army, the two ubiquitous constants in the country8217;s uncertain politics since the early years, it means continuation and reassurance of their ability to influence who gets what.

The judiciary can hold its head high, saying it has asserted its independence by restraining the government from announcing the obvious result, pending its probe into Musharraf8217;s eligibility to stand for a second term. For the ruling coalition it means laying a claim to power for the next five years.

The opposition gets another chance to vindicate its stance, with America and the army keeping them out. Benazir Bhutto gets to start with a slate washed clean of corruption charges; and the very predictable Maulana Fazlur Rahman gets another chance to masquerade his pragmatism to the military establishment and the US. Here8217;s a 8216;good8217; Islamist with roots in his people, an increasingly rare breed, that the world can do business with if it has to.

The only ones who don8217;t know what a re-elected Musharraf means are, once again, the people of Pakistan. They have remained conspicuous by their absence in the opposition8217;s and the legal fraternity8217;s recent street battles against the government8217;s ham-handed law enforcement apparatus. The depoliticisation of the public mind in Pakistan has been nearly achieved. The people have realised their irrelevance to the governance that the powers that be impose on them from time to time. They are even wary of the democratic experiments that this country has been subjected to over the years. The reasons are based on collective memory.

The beginning made in 1970, after military dictator-turned-elected president Ayub Khan stepped down and his deputy General Yahya Khan held the country8217;s only free and fair elections, had its collapse inherent in its very genesis. The majority winner, the Awami League of East Pakistan, was denied the right to form a government. The civil war that ensued was followed by a war with India, with Bangladesh coming into being.

In what remained of Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto unleashed his autocratic rule after bagging the popular vote and gave the country its first consensus-based, if not strictly democratically framed, constitution in 1973. Then the American-backed, and later anti-Soviet jihadist dictator, General Zia-ul Haq, struck. When his plane crashed as a result of sabotage in 1988, it was time for the army to take a strategic retreat into the barracks, but not without leaving its shadow behind.

Next came Benazir Bhutto. Even though she bagged the popular vote, Benazir Bhutto came to power in a compromise with the military, accepting the latter8217;s surrogate, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, as the all-powerful president under Zia8217;s amended constitution. The man was armed with the axe to send elected governments home if they failed to please him. Zia8217;s remnant and the then blue-eyed boy of the establishment, Nawaz Sharif, took turns with Benazir as prime minister, one after the other, twice; neither was allowed to complete a five-year term. When Sharif sacked Musharraf in October 1999, the army struck back with a vengeance.

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All this time the people have mainly been spectators, feeling they can only watch and not decide who comes to power and rules according to the law. In the process, over the years, the state8217;s failure to develop a workable mechanism for the transfer of power has meant varying Supreme Court judgments on the issue, whenever it came to that. For politicians, the absence of such a mechanism has meant having to broker power-sharing deals with the army, with the latter usually dictating the terms for its strategic retreat into barracks.

With some hindsight, one can say the army does it only grudgingly and at a time when it has little choice, given external factors or pressure from within on the army chief, for instance, to give others in uniform a chance at the helm. This is precisely what is at work at present. It will be naiuml;ve to give credit for any planned return to democracy to Musharraf or Benazir; much less to the Supreme Court of Pakistan, regardless of which way it swings this time round.

If the court rules against Musharraf8217;s eligibility to contest as president with the current assemblies as his electoral college, Musharraf will stay on as the army chief until elections are held and his handpicked deputies elect him anew as president. He8217;s done it before; he8217;ll do it again. The man symbolises the army8217;s ego, and that8217;s what must not be compromised at any cost.

The writer is an editor with 8216;Dawn8217;, Karachi