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Interview

‘Pakistan has had a de facto one-party system in place.’

Justice (R) Wajihuddin Ahmed talks to SouthAsia in this exclusive interview with Faizan Usmani.

November 2021

Justice Wajihuddin Ahmed, a retired justice of the Supreme Court of Pakistan, human rights activist, and former Chief Justice of the Sindh High Court, took up a leading role in the Lawyer’s Movement in 2007. He was Chief Justice of the Sindh High Court from November 5, 1997 to May 4,1998. He was moved to the Supreme Court in 1998. During his tenure as Chief Justice of the Sindh High Court, a large number of suo moto actions were taken. In 2011, he joined the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), being the party’s candidate for the presidential election in July, 2013. He lost the election to Mamnoon Hussain of Pakistan Muslim League (N). Later, Justice Wajihuddin left the PTI owing to differences with the party’s top leadership and formed his own political party ‘Aam Log Ittehad.’

What are your views on a one-party system? Would such a system be suitable for Pakistan?
Pakistan has been a guinea pig when it comes to putting different forms of governments to test. Honestly speaking, Pakistan has had a de facto one-party system in place, particularly during the military regimes, with a tendency to call the shots by setting up their own political parties. Elected through democratic means on the surface, however, the civilian governments also adopt a dictatorial approach to governance as they rarely consult other political and state stakeholders in matters of governance. The role of the Parliament in the legislative process is also limited since most legislation is carried out through the Presidential Ordinances. That’s the way the ball bounces in the name of democracy and electoral authoritarianism.

In the early stages, the democracies in the West were also not mature, but they kept improving their political systems on the basis of trial and error. Now democracy in the Western countries has reached a stage of maturity and all the political parties, including the ruling party, cannot move away from the basic tenets of democracy. Principally, the multiparty system is better than one-party rule. Different European states such as France, Germany, the United Kingdom, etc. take dissimilar electoral routes to form a government, but despite such procedural differences, the entire spirit of democracy remains intact. On this account, democracy is the name of achieving political awareness and applying the acquired political consciousness the right way.

I do not subscribe to the notion that Imran Khan is an honest and upright person.

A true democracy does not require the electorate to be highly educated, but they must have a certain level of political awareness and be able to exercise their electoral rights independently on their own. Unfortunately, this is not the case in Pakistan owing to a confluence of factors. First and foremost, the people living under the feudal system cannot vote against the will of their feudal lords, be it a sardar, chaudhry, a vadera, and the like. The same is equally true for a well-entrenched baradri system, blindly followed by a large number of people in both rural and urban Pakistan. In the baradri system, people always vote for an electoral candidate, who belongs to their family’s caste. When I was part of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), for instance, I was quite surprised to see that the candidates for the local bodies elections in the Punjab were mostly chosen from the Gujjar clan. Sectarianism is another factor that drives the people to vote for a candidate from their own sect or religious order during the general elections. Whether it is a one-party form of governance or multiparty rule, no system would ever produce the desired results unless we uproot the baradri system, feudalism and sectarianism, together with those stakeholders who are serving their vested interests.

What are the factors that don’t allow democracy to flourish in the country?
There are many factors that do not allow democracy to consolidate and become a social norm. For example, in an attempt to make sure that all the registered political parties adhere to the norms of democracy within the party, the Election Act 2017 made it obligatory that no political party will be registered by the Election Commission of Pakistan unless the party has a membership base of at least 2,000 people. One way or the other, political parties are able to observe these formalities but they have no intent to hold intra-party elections. At the PTI, I have been a witness to their intra-party elections and also once headed the PTI’s intra-party tribunal. However, those elections were rigged to the maximum and we were left with no option but to set aside the elections altogether. Since then, Imran Khan has not held intra-party elections in the right manner and the process of holding intra-party elections at the PTI is totally derailed.

If you examine the country’s three leading political parties, namely the Pakistan Peoples Party, the PML-N and the PTI, they all don’t even have a membership base on the ground. In the name of intra-party elections, the party leadership nominates a panel of candidates, who are elected unopposed and thus returns are submitted to the Election Commission. That’s it. One must say the multiparty situation is worse than the one-party system. In Western democracies, those who lead the political parties select the right candidates for the elections and don’t nominate themselves as electoral candidates. The situation in our political scene is just the reverse. For example, when I was a member of the PTI Parliamentary Board I found that other than myself the rest of the board members were standing in the elections. How can a member of the board of a democratic political party nominate himself as an electoral candidate? I think there must be a law to curb this anti-democratic practice. However, many things cannot be corrected through legislation such as the systematic development of democracy, the establishment of democratic norms, etc.

At the time when the Soviet Union was alive, the top leadership of the Communist Party, despite being the sole political party of the country, could not become part of the government. The secretary of the communist party was the most powerful person in the Soviet Union, but he never put himself forward to play a role in governance matters. The most pressing thing which must be addressed through legislative means is the mandatory inclusion of technocrats in the government. Similar to the reservation of seats for women and minorities in the Assembly, about 20 to 25 percent seats in the upper and lower houses of the Parliament, including the lower bodies, should also be reserved for technocrats at federal, provincial and local levels. Seemingly, the government in the United States is based on elected representatives, but in practice it is the form of the government, which is based on technocrats who have relevant experience and expertise in their respective fields. In short, we cannot have a real democracy in political parties in Pakistan unless various issues are effectively addressed, a task which is difficult to achieve given the present situation ruled by vested interests of the powerful elements.


What we can do through the law is to make sure that the political parties within and outside their political setups, adhere to democratic norms in letter and spirit. It is commonly said the Judiciary in Pakistan is a powerful institution. It is also said that both the Judiciary and the Armed Forces together tend to make and break the elected government. I do not subscribe to this notion as such, but I do know that the bureaucracy rules the roost amidst the lot of public representatives with no or a miserably low level of professional competence. Since power emanates from the barrel of the gun, the institutions run by competent people always call the shots, whether it is the Judiciary or the Armed Forces.

If the Judiciary was not taken on board, the constitutional deviations in Pakistan would not have been possible.

How could a positive change be brought about when even an honest person like Imran Khan with no record of corruption or abuse of public office, seems to fail in putting the country on the right path to social justice, economic growth and development?

First, I do not subscribe to the notion that Imran Khan is an honest and upright person. I spent about five to six years with the PTI, rubbing shoulders with the party’s top hierarchy. As time passed by, however, I and one of our fellows from the PTI left the party, one by one. The fellow once told me a beautiful thing about Imran Khan. He said, ‘How could a man be referred to as an honest person when his own shoelaces are not his own? My PTI fellow further said, “Someone who does not run his household on his own, has others to pay his home utility bills as well as monthly salaries of his housemaids and domestic servants, cannot be called an incorruptible person. A person does not fall in the category of being honest and upright, who has such luxurious vehicles as Pajero, Hilux and many others, which have all been provided and maintained by others. How could you call someone a high-minded and financially clean person, who has never taken out his wallet from his pocket? How could someone who does not even know how to run his household, run the country’s economy?

Secondly, the PTI, through its platform, sent the wrong people to the Parliament and it somehow cobbled the majority and successfully formed the cabinet as well. However, the PTI is unable to effectively run the government and can never do so, thanks to the so-called electables. As things stand today, the government is being run by a bevy of assistants, advisers and coordinators to the prime minister.

I am no economist and am just a graduate in Economics. But I can firmly say that in a country, there are two parallel lines of economy, categorised as domestic economy and external economy. The domestic economy necessitates appropriate taxation at the right place, optimal revenue generation and its rightful spending and disbursement. Unfortunately, a taxpaying culture has never flourished in the country, which cannot merely run on the basis of income tax. The country can only manage its financials on the basis of indirect taxes and deficit financing or loans. Therefore, it is not possible to run this country by imposing income taxe on people. Considering the low revenue generated through direct taxes, the country is basically being run through indirect taxes. However, the government is not capable of collecting indirect taxes too. When it comes to the external aspect of the economy, Pakistan is currently receiving remittances of about 25 to 30 billion dollars, while the gap between the country’s imports and exports is more or less equal to its total remittances. Given that fuel imports take away a major chunk of Pakistan’s revenues, the automobile sector is mass producing cars, in place of buses and locomotives, thus burdening the country’s already inflated import bill with an increasing cost of crude oil. The same goes for various luxury items which are being imported into the country without imposing regulatory duties.

In my opinion, Pakistan can easily control its imports and maintain the balance between imports and exports without resorting to heavy loans. Pakistan can easily pay off its foreign debts within 3 to 4 years by using the sizable remittances sent by overseas Pakistanis every year. However, what measures has the PTI government taken in this regard? As you know, where there’s a will, there’s a way. Let alone such basic attributes as honesty and competence, there is absolutely no will to do so at the government level.

Your views on the Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs).

Personally, I am in favour of using electronic voting machines (EVMs) in elections. However, would we be able to ensure that the EVMs would not be manipulated? If it is possible, then we must go for the EVMs. Otherwise, there is no use in replacing the existing voting system with a new one.

In your opinion, is the Judiciary also responsible for the poor state of the country?
The Judiciary has had a major role in the country’s poor state of affairs. If the Judiciary was not taken on board, the constitutional deviations in Pakistan would not have been possible. From the pre-Constitution era of Pakistan, Justice Munir and his cronies were taken under the influence of the powers that be. At that time, when the Supreme Court was not set up, the five judges of the Apex Court and the Central Court were also managed. As a case in example, one of the five judges was sent to the then East Pakistan as an acting governor and Justice S.A. Rehman of the Lahore High Court was placed in his position. The move was taken to settle the case of Maulvi Tamizuddin Khan and the Assembly was accordingly sent home. Another worse case took place in 1955 when the Federal Court led by Chief Justice Muhammad Munir ruled in support of the Governor General on the basis of the ‘Law of Necessity,’ which was introduced for the first time in deciding constitutional matters. The floodgates were then opened and when General Ayub Khan took over the reins, it was again the Supreme Court Judges who approved the Martial Law takeover, making a historic remark in the verdict’s observation that ‘a successful revolution brings its own law.’

Later Justice Munir admitted that he was consulted and asked to adjudicate on the legitimacy of the provisional constitutional order of the Martial Law regime in 1958. Though the court tried to mend the trend in 1972 in Asma Jilani’s case, it failed. In 1977 again in Nusrat Bhutto’s case, the Supreme Court judges had decided that they would not grant General Zia-ul-Haq the power to amend the Constitution. My father was also part of the Supreme Court bench. Having retired from the Supreme Court in 1974, he was recalled to function as the ad hoc judge in 1977. In fact, he was the first Supreme Court judge to be recalled. In Nusrat Bhutto’s case, however, Chief Justice Anwar-ul-Haque surreptitiously inserted a particular phrase in the order, which conferred constitutional amendment powers on Zia-ul-Haq. On the other hand, the Judges had already decided that Gen Zia-ul-Haq would go back to the barracks soon after holding the elections. However, when the nitty-gritty of the verdict before its official proclamation, was being discussed and finalised by the bench of judges, Chief Justice Anwar-ul-Haque incorporated a sentence ‘including the power to amend the Constitution’ in the verdict. And you already know what happened after that, for instance, in 2002. In short, the Judiciary has a major role in what we have come to today.

What is the future of democracy in Pakistan?
If truth be told, we have never had democracy in Pakistan. You are completely wrong if you think that those who sit in the Assembly are truly the public representatives. In fact, they represent the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie in whose hands the entire wealth is concentrated. Interestingly, this is not the case in Pakistan only, as in well-entrenched democracies of the West, the public, comprising the proletariat and petty-bourgeoisie classes, is never represented in its true sense because with low income they can never afford to go to the Assembly. On the contrary, in a country like China with a one-party system in place, a common man from the Communist Party of China may find his way to the government, though the Communist Party does not represent the entire 1.402 billion population of the country. Their political leadership does not stick to the top position for the rest of their lives and they have to sidestep for other members after a fixed period of time. Even a person like Mao had to give way for new faces.

Honestly speaking, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Be it a one-party rule or the multiparty way-out, the system must be able to deliver for the welfare of the people. This is also evident in the history of Islam. For example the Ottoman Empire was run for centuries by a single-party format, but it delivered. However, the Muslim rulers of yore started losing their reins on governance and control when the connection between the rulers and the public was cut. That disconnection, as a corollary, led to the end of the Ottoman dynasty too. The Holy Quran does not approve any particular system of government, but it directs us not to deviate from the straight and th right path, referred to as Sirate al-Mustaqeem. And the beginning of the end starts the moment one deviates from the right path. Be it a multiparty system, one-party governance, real democracy, or so-called democratic rule, it takes time to evolve and improve things, which otherwise cannot be implemented through a revolution.

What is the future of Karachi, since the financial and economic hub of the country now looks to be a city conquered by the Sindh Government?
I think the Sindh Government, being run by the Pakistan Peoples Party, is playing a detrimental role for the city. I wonder why don’t they realise the repercussions of their actions that could even lead to taking over of the city by the Western powers as a replacement of Hong Kong, or the city of Karachi could become a separate province down the road. The PPP-led Sindh Government seems to fail in realizing the consequences of their actions, but wittingly or unwittingly, they are moving in this direction. In my opinion, the rulers of Sindh are probably doing it quite knowingly as if they have solely been appointed to steer the city towards more chaos and anarchy by pushing it to absolute independence or something similar in the vein. How could one kill the hen that lays the golden egg? No one can deny the fact that the revenue generated by the Interior Sindh is minuscule compared to the revenue generated by Karachi alone. If you go out of Karachi and see Larkana city, the PPP’s citadel as well as its real capital, you will find the city ina shambles. I strongly feel they are not fools and are intentionally working on a well-defined agenda to get things done in their favour.

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