A perspective on military’s takeovers

Columnist MB NAQVI looks at the military’s penchant for ruling the nation.

Military interventions have given Pakistan a bad image. The country is, and is known, an unstable one where democracy does not work and breaks down all too often. The image worries many Pakistanis. Aware Pakistanis feel diminished. They are discriminated against in foreign countries in a number of ways. Sometimes open and sometimes barely veiled taunts of being less than civilised for not being able to run a civilised —- i.e. a democratic —- system of government. They feel ashamed of their country where military establishes its dictatorship every now and then. As it happens, currently the fourth military dictatorship has been set up in the space of 53 years. The generals are ruling again. The feeling of being slighted by the generals heightens the degree of sensitive Pakistanis’.

The question is: why does democracy collapse in Pakistan so frequently and how is it that the military finds it necessary, and quite easy, to takeover. There is never any opposition. Indeed, newspapers report more than mere acceptance; it is claimed that people welcome such takeovers. These reports are not necessarily untrue. They contain varying combinations of exaggeration, reporters’ own prejudices and other well-connected opinion makers’ glee. On the whole, a contrived welcome by supposed leaders of opinion is usually stage-managed. It has become a ritual for official spin doctors. It calls for some thought.

The inquiry should be about the basic causes of the failure of democratic experiments and to affix responsibility: who is at fault? The answer is not very difficult to find: It is the citizens of the country who are in the last analysis responsible. Had they not been so weak and wayward-minded —- not to say ignorant and careless —- how could military interventions be possible? It shall remain their fault. There are no extenuating circumstances, though there can be an attempt to understand how this happens. That will help find an explanation for the phenomenon of this citizens’ weakness and so of the weak defences of democracy. That is not difficult to discover. The fact of the matter is that in the areas constituting Pakistan, political tradition was always weak. The social set up in these areas is dominated by Chaudhries, Khans, Waderas, Wajahs and Sardars. They rule their fiefdom with an iron hand, despite the socalled law of the land. How do they do so is because the common people at the grassroots level are authoritarian-minded.

Authoritarians are not only the top-dogs who bark orders. No authoritarianism can survive unless there are people at the bottom whose mind is so conditioned as to accept their own lowly status and their duty to obey unquestioningly the command of their lord and master. It is this mindset of the lower orders that constitutes the fundamental basis of authoritarianism. Pakistan’s case has proved that authoritarianism does not require the crutches of actual law. In Pakistan the law says all citizens are equal and the rich ones or the landlords do not have any legal power to compel absolute obedience from common haris. And yet this is what happens all the time. This is the fundamental basis on which the social system actually works. When a government in distant Islamabad orders an election, who becomes the candidate who is required to spend something between Rs. 1 to 10 crore for a large-sized National Assembly constituency. Why? they are from the traditional ruling families, the socalled five thousand families of Pakistan, who, one is told, have been reduced to about 1000 or so throughout the country. They manage to persuade their lower orders to vote for “the family” —- and these go and dutifully vote for their masters. The technical citizens are not really citizens; in practice they still are virtual serfs, though some of the typical disabilities of a classical European serf do not apply or their equivalents are gradually disappearing. They are the products of a backward and politically undeveloped social system. They are not aware of their fundamental rights; they do not know their status in the state. They are only aware of their own miseries and the necessity of doing as they are told by their betters or even elders. That is the basic weakness of democracy in Pakistan. Elsewhere, such as in India, democracy survives because there are enough citizens in the country, who being aware of their rights, ensure that the government is changed according to the consensus they shape and rest of the time it obeys them or else it goes next time. This does not apply to Pakistan —- because no one has dared reform the basic social system.

One of the results of this underdeveloped politics is that the politicians who (regularly) return to the Assemblies are actually unaccountable —- to the citizens. What do they do? It depends on the individuals too. Most are self-regarding and promote their own material and political interests. Many line their pockets. They engage in various kinds of corruption, including the most acceptable form of corruption of all: trying to get the youngmen of their area recruited into state services. That makes them more popular and earns them a more benevolent image in their area. But it is corruption nonetheless. Most of them do not worry about acquiring such an image. They merely look for occasions or ways of enriching themselves so that they can spend even greater amount in the next elections to come. The reason why politicians are corrupt or inefficient lies in the running of the governments.

The social system gets reflected in the running of the government, in a manner of speaking. The top man acts like a big feudal lord throwing his weight about. The mere MPAs and MNAs become so many from the lower orders —- at that higher plateau of power. The accent remains on unaccountability and corruption of various kinds grows. Within the army the subalterns and the middle rank officers, reading the newspapers and hearing the stories in drawing rooms they visit, acquire contempt for the politicians. They see them both as inefficient and corrupt. (These two qualities seem usually go together). A climate of opinion among the officer corps grows and when the rumours become too many of corruption and inefficiency and of bottlenecks, the officers become restive. The Army Chief of the day then concludes that the time is ripe for him to strike. And he does. He takesover. The army’s linkages with the opinion leaders —- corruption of the primary kind —- ensures that a welcome of sorts is recorded in the media for posterity. The army then faces the music of running a backward country on the given assumptions and policies that insistently have not changed over decades. The dictator then thinks of various ways of prolonging his rule and then gradually finds a way to civilianise itself. This is the master stroke. That mutates the military dictatorship into a democracy for the benefit of foreigners; certainly the major powers accept it at face value as a matter of convenience.

But what does a military regime actually do. In day-to-day matters, it acts exactly like the civilians act, except that in the beginning there is much toing and froing and more frenzied activity. It begins by showing that a great reformistic activity is on. But the military rulers and his top ranking colleagues are even more unaccountable. They are unaccountable by definition. It is for them to make policies, shout orders and it is for others to obey without questioning. They expect the whole country to do the same: obey. Up to a point, it does. But civilians being civilians, the obedience part is insufficient for the generals’ taste. It looks to them like insubordination. It is certainly insubordination but not intended as such. It is just the civilians way. There are always people who question, make caustic comments and put unfavourable light on things. That goes on all the time everywhere. But the military rulers being more unaccountable and taken as a whole, do much the same things as the civilians do. To begin with, their decision making is more or less whimsical in details and on relatively minor matters. And on major matters, military’s dictatorship conforms to the standard or historical pattern. In the earlier stages there is not much corruption of monetary kind; the senior generals generally do not take cash bribes. But the decision making being by unaccountable officers, whether civilian or military, corruption does slip in —- and as time passes, on an ever rising scale.

In some ways military regimes are inefficient in a special, and crucial, sense. They might make decisions quickly but hurry in grave matters generally carries grave risks of the miscarriage of justice. It ignores side effects that can be deleterious. A military regime is an actually dangerous thing. It can be inefficient in a more radical sense and it can be more corrupt in all senses of the term. Just cast a glance back on the past 50 years and look at the various generals who have ruled the country. Were they paragons of personal virtue? Were there not cases of banal corruption? Were there not cases of political mistakes on a huge scale? And so forth. The country had to pay the price of dismemberment primarily because of the politics of the generals who ruled this country. Even today the people say highly unfavourable things about the working of the NAB. Its actions admit of various interpretations. Have not the people said that the corrupt politicians and defaulters buy their freedom —- a sort of ransom. In short, military interventions do not improve the overall situation. Can anyone say that Pakistan’s basic situation in all important departments —- state of national security, integrity and unity of the people, its economy and the standing of the country vis-a-vis rest of the world —- is any better than what it was during the beginning of the month of October 1999 under Nawaz Sharif’s prime ministership. Who can say Pakistan’s situation has actually improved in any significant way?

The question arises why then does the military intervene ever so often. How do they find it so easy? The answer has already been given. The picture of social situation given in the foregoing paragraphs shows that there are top dogs and under dogs. There is nothing in between by way of a politically aware middle class in sizeable numbers and with some clout. The top dogs are in clover; they are self-regarding, indeed selfish. They can afford to be. At the bottom, the people are powerless; enjoy no rights; are not aware of the laws that are there for their protection. They just do not know or care about the difference between a civilian and a military regime. There is in fact a huge vacuum where there should be massive democratic politics being conducted by the citizens all the time. They should be expressing their views on hundreds of issues and policies. They would demand cancellation or changes in certain policies, want new ones and condemning what they regard negative or wrong activity that may be going on. It is the democratic politics at grassroots level that distinguishes democratic countries from military-run quiet states.

Anyone who has lived in an apartment in London or any American city even for a short stay receives daily in the mail or directly in the room any amount of information of meetings, discussions or demos in the locality on issues ranging from those strictly pertaining to the neighbourhood or borough to international ones. It is this massive activity by citizens that, in its totality, becomes an accountability process —- even the results achieved by borough contracts are discussed, examined and analysed. Local schooling problems are under as constant scrutiny as are about sanitation or the state of employment. There is thus no vacuum of political leadership even at the local levels that is generally the effective reason why military does not and cannot intervene. There will be unimaginable uproar and uprising should there be even a suspicion of their military thinking about possible takeover in the US or UK or anywhere else. But once the military gets into the rut of the ruling in a backward country such as Myanmar, it behaves like all its past rulers. It has to be so. The only way the phenomenon of military governments can be changed is by filling the vacuum of leadership —- actually by citizenship —- and thus creating a new leadership.

The question is two fold. How does one fill the vacuum that one has talked about? It can be rephrased: how to prevent military interventions? It is hard to answer the question but a few negative things can definitely be said: what will not do.

(a) A lot of people tend to preach and read sermons. People see virtue in them and even relevance in their sermons. But act according to their immediate interests and possibilities of promoting those interests. On that there should be no confusion. The prophets, social reformers and moralists have preached through the ages. God Almighty had to send, according to Muslim belief, 124,000 Prophets to improve the morality and conduct of humanity. Just look at the actual situation in the world around. The fact of the matter is that preaching has never succeeded except for a very small minority. Military interventions will not end simply by lectures or by fine articles in the press.

(b) There are people who think that international pressures in favour of democracy will do the trick. International pressures do the trick in a very partial or limited way. Only window-dressing and civilian make-up on the military accoutrements will do the trick for a basically military regime. It orders an election under well-drafted Legal Framework Orders and the assembly is in form democratic and it elects the dictator as the President and lo and behold democracy has arrived. Consciences of leading western countries would thus be salved. What the content of that democracy is, is no concern of foreigners. They are prepared to accept at face value, if a set up looks like an elected system.

(c) There are many people in this country who have urged writing in the Constitution very tough clauses against military takeovers. The people who drafted the 1973 Constitution wrote a very tough, indeed the toughest imaginable, article in the Constitution. They defined a that military takeover as treason and it was made punishable with death. But what happened? Writing tough penalties does nothing. Look at what happened to the 1973 Constitution. It was overthrown in July 1977, it was mangled and virtually prostituted in 1985 and it was ignored again in 1999. If the constitution could be so easily bent, what is the point of writing tough clauses? This kind of thing will not do.

(d) The only way to strengthen democracy is to strengthen it from below and fill in the space with the best politics people can engage in between the top and the very bottom. As many citizens as possible have to be brought into the picture. So long as the citizens of Pakistan remain the docile creatures they are and so long as they remain politically unaware, negative things will continue to happen as they have been; nothing will change. Military interventions or civilian regimes, they will all act in the same way. They will not be responsive to popular aspirations and wishes if the people are not in a position to aspirate them loudly and insistently enough. These have to be competently formulated. That is a tall order.

Can the people fill the vacuum? So long as this cannot be done there is no point in opposing and crying about military interventions. They will go on taking place. Although it is possible to frighten the generals for a time, though it will not be easy. A general by definition is a self-confident and outward looking tough guy who looks straight in front, surveys the field, analyses the strength of the opposition and assesses his own. He lurches forward and strikes —- to win. In a case like Pakistan’s, he is bound to win. But if he does not or cannot win, trouble starts. The state speedily wilts. But where he wins, he has to rule. He has to face the problem of a very tough nature. Then the absence of a political system makes him confident enough to start manufacturing a new one. That however is not his cup of tea. He does not succeed because of all the fundamental difficulties one has talked about. The new system would be as weak as the old. We have seen all the military-created systems have failed in this country. Does anyone remember the fate of the Basic Democracies? Or have the various wonderful reforms of Gen. Zia helped made Pakistan a progressive, economically strong and politically and socially progressive country? It is certainly a sixtyfour dollar question as to how to fill the political vacuum in the country with the human material we have. Frightening the generals should be easy if only they can be made to listen and to find time to pause and think. If there is no well-oiled or working system of succession in the state one general will be overthrown by another and the process can become as ridiculous as it will be ugly. They had better stop the political game they have played, which in some ways, looks like that of musical chairs. But like preaching, threats of these ills and longer-term dangers cannot make a determined, ambitious general desist.

At one stage in 1973 some Sindhi and Baloch nationalists had recorded additional threats. They had sought, on the record, that should another military intervention take place, the federation of Pakistan shall be treated as having been dissolved. Their reasoning is wellknown. They still think that military intervenes only when the Punjab-dominated establishment thinks that the democracy has walked into a blind alley and is at the end of its options: It has to prevent Punjab’s maximalist interests from suffering. So they revert to the well tried experiment of One Unit. A military government is One Unit by another name. And which is why they had made the threat. That is why they talked of the federation of Pakistan being made vital and vigorous. This can only be so if federation is genuine and provincial autonomy is adequate and effective. Military interventions means extinction of all provincial autonomy. A military government is a centralised system of decision making that kills all local initiative and decision-making. Which is why it can be said the federal structure of Pakistan is in grave danger. Well, a military takeover did happen and nothing much happened. Were those threats empty or fears unjustified?

The fact of the matter is that two military interventions have taken place since 1973. The nominal federation of Pakistan continues to survive whether or not it is vital and vigorous. Why were those threats made? The reason is exactly the same as noted in the case of mainstream parties. The social set up in the country does not allow space for any rational or well thought out politics of reform. The nationalists are as hampered and handicapped by the vacuum in the society or the absence of the citizenship, making the job of coup makers easy. The regional nationalist politicians are as impotent as the mainstream politicians vis-a-vis the generals. The basic issue however remains no matter what threats are hurled at the military that are mostly empty. Which is why the generals can afford to ignore them. But an all round weakening of the state becomes accelerated under a military regime.