Democracy Tsunami About To Hit Pakistan
By Gul Jammas Hussain
09 May, 2013
Countercurrents.org
Pakistan’s powerful generals and feudal landlords have managed to keep the people poor and uneducated and the country underdeveloped for years, but it appears that they are finally going to be swept from power this week as the wave of the people’s desire for democracy has begun surging into a tsunami.
Pakistan achieved its independence and was declared a sovereign state in 1947 following the end of the 90-year-old British Raj in India.
India, under the skillful leadership of former prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, introduced massive land reforms that ended the feudal landlords’ grip on power and control of vast tracts of land. And during his nearly 17 years in office, Nehru helped to establish and strengthen democratic institutions within the country and did not allow the army to interfere in domestic politics.
In Pakistan, unfortunately, the founder of the nation, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the first governor general of the country, died a year after Pakistan came into existence, after which the country’s armed forces began interfering in politics on the pretext of protecting national security.
In 1951, Pakistan’s first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, whose qualifications were second to Jinnah, was gunned down while he was addressing a public rally in the garrison city of Rawalpindi. The mystery of his murder has never been solved. Some say rogue elements within the Pakistani army were involved in his assassination. After Khan’s murder and the ensuing leadership vacuum, power was seized by army-backed civilian bureaucrats and technocrats -- an elite class that was created and patronized by the British under their raj. This class was nourished to be loyal to their foreign (white) masters and disloyal to their own (brown) people. Many post-colonial writers in India and Pakistan called them Brown Sahibs.
Then in 1958, the commander-in-chief of the Pakistani armed forces, Muhammad Ayub Khan, seized power in a coup d’état. He joined forces with the feudal landlords -– a wealthy landholding elite who possess vast tracts of the country’s agricultural land and treat the rural masses as their serfs -- and nurtured a new class of industrialists who helped him stay at the helm for 11 years. Unfortunately, these nouveau riche industrialists also developed a feudal mentality instead of adopting progressive thinking.
During Pakistan’s first 60 years, army generals ruled for 33 years. They spent a lot of money -- nearly one fourth of the country’s total budget -- on the armed forces, but paid little attention to the promotion of health care and education, and the eradication of poverty.
The generals also inflicted tremendous damage on the democratic institutions of Pakistan, such as the parliament, the judiciary, and the media. The legislature was turned into a rubber-stamp parliament, and judges were forced to dance to the tune of the rulers. There was no concept of independent media, and those journalists, writers, and poets who tried to challenge the military rule or the army’s relentless interference in politics were punished in various ways. Many were put behind bars, and many others were forced to flee the country to save their lives.
General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq was the worst of all of Pakistan's military rulers. He seized power in a military coup in 1977 and hanged Pakistan's first democratically elected prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was extremely popular among the masses, in 1979.
During Zia’s 11 years in power, the country went to hell in a handbasket. He gravely damaged every national institution except the military. In 1979, Zia joined the United States’ proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and allowed the United States and Saudi Arabia to establish religious educational centers -- known as madrassas -- in Pakistan, located near the border with Afghanistan, for the purpose of preparing militants to fight against Soviet troops. These schools were used not only to train militants in warfare but also to promulgate a hardcore religious ideology, which brainwashed students, who began viewing other Muslims as weak or even as infidels. This insidious ideology destroyed the civilized nature of Pakistani society and brought extremism and terrorism to the country. For the first time in Pakistan, Shia Muslims came under attack from these new ideologues. And Shias were not the only ones attacked. Sufis and other moderate Muslims became targets as well.
In order to provide some kind of legitimacy to his rule, Zia finally established a rubber-stamp parliament in 1985. The parliament was filled with feudal landlords and pro-army industrialists, such as the Sharifs of Lahore -- former prime minister Nawaz Sharif and his brother Shabaz Sharif, the former chief minister of Punjab -– while true representatives of the people were not allowed to enter the parliament. These feudal landlords were created by the British during their rule over India. During the British Raj, the feudal lords remained loyal to their foreign masters, who allotted them massive tracts of land for free, but when the British left in 1947, they had to search for new masters, which turned out to be the military rulers of Pakistan.
Three military dictators --- Ayub Khan, Zia-ul-Haq, and Pervez Musharraf -- all used these bootlicking feudal landlords and others from the industrial elite to maintain their grip on power.
In 1988, Zia, who had dreamed of ruling Pakistan for thirty years -- along with almost all the top brass of the Pakistani military -- vanished into thin air when his plane crashed. Many say the United States was behind the crash since Washington used Zia to defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and once the U.S. won its proxy war, the general, who had already started to box above his weight class, was no longer needed by Washington.
Zia’s death provided Benazir Bhutto an opportunity to participate in the 1988 parliamentary election, in which she was victorious against all the odds. While she became prime minister, the remnants of the Zia regime in the Pakistan’s military establishment never gave Bhutto a free hand to run the government, and after just 20 months, the establishment conspired against her and she was removed from office.
In 1990, the real movers and shakers of Pakistan threw their weight behind Nawaz Sharif’s rightist coalition -- the Islami Jamhoori Ittehad (IJI). Sharif became prime minister, but he shot himself in the foot three years later by picking a fight with the representative of the country’s security establishment -- President Ghulam Ishaq Khan. As a result, Sharif resigned under pressure from the Pakistani army.
In 1993, Bhutto again became the prime minister of Pakistan, but this time her government was dismissed on massive corruption charges in 1996 by President Farooq Ahmad Khan Leghari -- a member of her own party, the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). Bhutto not only failed to prevent the feudal landlords in her party from plundering the country, she also failed to hammer out a satisfactory working relationship with the military establishment.
Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League (N) won a landslide victory in the 1997 parliamentary election, and he became prime minister for a second time. In 1997, Sharif was a popular and powerful prime minister, but his popularity curve gradually descended until it hit rock bottom in 1999. Seizing the opportunity, the military establishment, led by General Pervez Musharraf, ended Sharif’s rule in a bloodless coup in October 1999.
Musharraf declared himself chief executive of the country and a military court quickly convicted Sharif in a hasty trial and gave him a life sentence. During this episode, Musharraf wrote in his memoirs that thanks to Saudi Arabia, Sharif's life was spared by the military court and otherwise Sharif would have met the same fate as Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. The following year, Sharif, along with his entire family, was exiled to Saudi Arabia and was banned from returning to Pakistan for 10 years.
In the aftermath of the coup, most of the country’s corrupt politicians jumped on Musharraf’s bandwagon.
During his nine-year rule, Musharraf made many mistakes, as all dictators do. First of all, under his leadership in 2001, Pakistan joined the United States in its so-called war on terror, which set off a conflagration of extremism and terrorism in the tribal areas of Pakistan bordering Afghanistan, whose flames still threaten to consume the country. And then Musharraf started a fight with the Judiciary, which finally led to his downfall in 2008.
Despite all these shortcomings, Musharraf’s administration was, relatively speaking, superior to that of his predecessors. He gave greater freedom to the electronic and print media and made some key changes in Pakistan’s higher education system. Musharraf also brought many young people into politics and launched numerous development projects in the country.
Today there are more than 100 television networks -- including about 40 news networks -- in Pakistan. Pakistanis no longer watch soap operas on the entertainment channels; instead, they watch intellectual discussions and heated debates among politicians, journalists, lawyers, intellectuals, and academics on their TV screens. This resulted in such a high level of awareness among the people that although President Asif Ali Zardari’s government was perhaps the most corrupt and incompetent in the last 35 years, no general dared to stage a coup to remove the democratically elected government from power.
Consequently, for the first time in Pakistan’s history, a democratically elected government completed its five-year tenure in March 2013, and now Pakistan is scheduled to hold new elections under the interim government on May 11.
In short, the free media gave rise to enlightened Pakistanis. The free media discredited the old, corrupt politicians of the country who had been in bed with the military dictator, and made Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), which mainly consists of new, young, and clean politicians, the most popular political party in the country.
Khan’s bold stance on Washington’s war on terror, which he calls a war of terror, his struggle for the rule of law, justice, and equality and the eradication of corruption, and his insistence that Pakistan must finally change have endeared him to the Pakistani people.
It is hard to imagine how much Pakistan has changed with the advent of an independent judiciary and free media. Today, Musharraf is under house arrest in Islamabad in connection with several cases against him that arose due to his actions during his days in office. Every day, one court or the other summons him to appear and puts him in the dock. And when he leaves, lawyers and civil rights activists chant slogans and scream abuse at him.
None of this would have been imaginable in Pakistan even ten years ago, when the military held sway. But today, after seeing Musharraf’s predicament, who in the military would dare to remove an elected government by force and risk subjecting himself to such an ordeal?
All of this shows that the days of military dictatorships are being consigned to history and the beacon of democracy in Pakistan is burning brighter and brighter with each passing day.
The writer is a Pakistani journalist based in Tehran, Iran.
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