Politics is a good word

The PPP-PML-N agreement was signed exactly one year after the arbitrary removal of Pakistan’s Supreme Court Chief Justice by General Pervez Musharraf. The chief justice’s refusal to go away quietly and Musharraf’s subsequent repressive measures led the country’s civil society and middle class into recognising the fallacy of the notion of a benign or enlightened autocracy.

Now there is a wide consensus among Pakistanis that for good or for bad, democracy is the way forward for the country and that there can be no democracy without politicians. Only Musharraf still claims that he can provide stability to Pakistan. Everyone else, including his erstwhile US backers, recognises that Musharraf is now a marginal figure in Pakistan’s future. The politicians he maligned for years are the ones with popular support.

These politicians have become wiser with time and are unwilling to accept manipulated squabbling among them that derailed previous attempts at establishing democracy. Since the elections of February 18, both the PML-N and the PPP have effectively thwarted establishment-backed efforts to divide them.

Musharraf and his coterie will still continue to try and sow the seeds of discord among the elected politicians, reflecting the deep-rooted antipathy towards politics cultivated by Pakistan’s ruling oligarchy. The politicised generals, technocrats, senior civil servants, international bankers and global businessmen who have virtually controlled the fate of Pakistan in long periods of military rule have also worked hard to depoliticise discourse about governance in Pakistan.

Only last week Musharraf declared that parliamentarians should not waste their time in politicking and should focus on governance. Trained to think of governance as only administration, Musharraf does not understand that politicking is an integral part of government.

Before the military’s direct intervention in government under Field Marshal Ayub Khan in 1958 Pakistan’s politics were by and large civil, cooperative and non-violent. Patronage, protest and policy differences were all factors in the political process, as they are in any non-authoritarian system. But Ayub Khan began a process of demonising politics and politicians that continues to this day.

Some segments of Pakistan’s elite have never accepted the value of the political process. They have embraced the view of the country as a corporation. Under this view, rulers are measured by their ability to improve GDP growth rates just as a corporation is assessed by its bottom line profit.

The agreement between Zardari and Sharif offers an opportunity for the creation of a stable democratic coalition. Instead of attempting to undermine it to keep Musharraf in charge, Pakistan’s permanent institutions of state should now allow the politicians to move Pakistan in the direction of an open democratic society that lets political accommodation and negotiation determine the direction of the state rather than manipulation by hidden hands.

The writer is director of Boston University’s Centre for International Relations haqqanibu.edu