Mirage of Mandate

The present hybrid regime has been fully using Pakistan’s edge over India in the brief war (6-10 May) to enhance its public acceptability at home, improve its image abroad as a representative administration in control of the governing leverages with national institutions working in tandem within constitutional paradigms complementing each other for the smooth business of state affairs. Does the country’s educated class believe in this portrayal of the civilian administration’s image or how the world around us views the democratic credentials of the current regime?

We show little concern whether or not the world has recognized us as a democratic nation. The public mandate has carried little weight in matters of governance. We take consolation from the smooth bilateral dealings with friendly countries and the public silence at home. We have been putting up with extra-constitutional hybrid rules for many decades. Hence, we don’t feel any qualm over the constitutional oddity inherent in such a system of governance, laying bare its unrepresentative or undemocratic character.

The superiority in the war allowed the security establishment to improve its public image, which had received severe blows over the past four years owing to the political controversy in the country stirred by the arbitrary ousting of the PTI regime and the incarceration of its founder chairman and senior leaders for the past two years. The PTI chairman has, rightly or wrongly, emerged as the symbol of resistance to the intervention of the security establishment in the political, judicial, and legislative affairs of the country, to the greatest peril of important state institutions. The perceived incompetence of civilian leaders and the controversy over interference in state institutions have been the root cause of our governance problems.

Though partly correct, this perception muddles constitutional paradigms, creates many power centers, weakens command and control, and erodes public confidence in elections and democratic processes. The legal and constitutional veneer of the exertion of influence by the security establishment is too thin to camouflage the gnawing constitutional and political contradictions within the country, making it more ungovernable. Friends keep guessing where the real power lies and which persons or institutions should be approached. This confusion leads to friends in the foreign diplomatic community making unconventional decisions, which causes embarrassment to the nation.

For instance, the unconventional decision of U.S. President Donald Trump to invite Field Marshal General Asim Munir for a luncheon meeting in the White House. Though the meeting signaled a paradigm shift in the U.S. policy to reset bilateral relations with Pakistan in recognition of the emerging geo-strategic scenario in South Asia in the aftermath of the brief war between the two nuclear states of the region, it, however, raised many eyebrows in the protocol-conscious world. The meeting signified a phenomenal turn in our bilateral relations with the U.S., dashing the decades-long Indian narrative painting Pakistan as a rogue state that sponsors terrorism to achieve its foreign policy objectives.

President Donald Trump’s move signified an end to the U.S. policy of viewing Pakistan through the Indian lens. However, the luncheon meeting also caused some embarrassment to our civilian leadership. No senior civilian leader was present at this historically unprecedented luncheon meeting, conveying an odd message to the world. Although we have been familiar with innuendoes that ‘Pakistan is not governed by its elected leaders, but by its security establishment,’ yet entertaining a serving general for one-on-one talks from the most powerful man in the world has, I am afraid to say, given credence to these insinuations. The unconventional event has drawn a big question mark about the status of the civilian setup in Pakistan.

Let us be clear that our Constitution has no room for such informal power-sharing. The Constitution specifies powers and privileges of the organs of the state – the Legislative, Executive, and Judiciary. The Constitution does not brook the breach of its provisions in terms of fundamental rights of the people, representative rule, elections, and the independence of the legislative and judiciary. With no safety valve provided in the Constitution, the public resistance to the unauthorized assumption of powers, in the past, has resulted in constitutional deadlocks and protracted martial laws.

The wise leaders mitigate the chances of the collapse of civilian authority. The martial laws, in their wake, spawn complex issues. The unelected forces create new political conditions to maintain power, manipulating economic, financial, and social facts and political and ideological narratives. In doing so, they promote pliable political groups and fan ethnic, linguistic, and parochial fissures to divide the people and rule. Political leaders with wide public support are sidelined, maligned as corrupt and anti-state, tried in mock judicial processes, and jailed or forced to go into exile. After some years, these leaders are washed clean through equally mock judicial processes and remounted on the saddle of power. We have been watching this rib-tickling cycle for the past seven decades in our country and the developing nations in Asia and Africa.