Political Stability in Pakistan Increasingly Elusive

By M.M. Ali

For more than half the 60 years of its existance, Pakistan has been under military rule. With each coup, the army has undermined the country’s political system and institutions in order to consolidate its own hold. Most recently, Gen. Pervez Musharraf grabbed power in October 1999. Last year he sacked Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhri and the other Supreme Court judges who challenged his policies.

Musharraf’s move has not been fully successful, however. While he managed to get re-elected to another five-year term by a lame duck National Assembly, and, in response to strong pressure by the late Benazir Bhutto and others, removed his military uniform in favor of civilian clothes, the office of the president which he holds as a result is one with much reduced authority.

This is the result of Feb. 18 national elections that nearly obliterated Musharraf’s Pakistan Muslim League (PML-Q) and returned to power Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N. Bhutto’s widower and now PPP head Asif Zardari joined with former rival Sharif to put forth Asif Raza Gilani, a PPP man from Pakistan’s Multan district, as the new prime minister.

Sharif is hell-bent on removing Musharraf from office, an endeavor in which he has found support from the lawyers community, led by Atezaz Ahsan, chairman of the Federal Judicial Council. Zardari, who was known as Mr. 10 Percent when his wife was prime minister in the early 1980s, managed, before the new coalition government was formed, to get all corruption charges against him dropped by Musharraf’s interim government, led by Mohammedmian Soomro. Sharif’s fear is that Musharraf’s removal might result in the National Assembly revoking his reprieve. Furthermore, the Supreme Court could well reopen the cases against him—especially if Chief Justice Chaudhri and his fellow justices were reinstated.

Zardari, however, has devised a way to ensure his own security by including in the national budget a clause increasing the size of the Supreme Court from the original 16 to 29 justices. In addition to potentially bringing back the deposed judges—only the number, not the names, of justices was specified—this could allow the judges subsequently appointed by Musharraf to retain their seats. The National Assembly approved the budget on June 22.

Sharif is hell-bent on removing Musharraf from office.

The following day, the High Court of Punjab declared Sharif ineligible to hold elected office because of his previous convictions. This created a commotion in Punjab, where Sharif’s PML-N holds a majority in the provincial assembly. Indeed, Sharif’s brother Shahbaz Sharif, president of the PML-N, had been elected to the Punjab provincial assembly in June 10 by-elections and has now become chief minister of Punjab province. Supporters in Lahore took to the streets to protest the court decision.

In response to a call by lawyers community leader Ahsan for a June 10 to 13 “Long March” to demand reinstatement of the deposed judges and judicial independence, lawyers from throughout the country flocked to Islamabad. After arriving in the capital and holding a public rally, however, instead of staging a sit-down demonstration until their demands were met the marchers simply dispersed. It is rumored that Zardari privately promised to reinstate the judges and asked the march organizers not to push further and risk clashing with the administration. Many people, including lawyers, are disappointed at the protest’s abrupt ending. Reinstatement of the judges has turned into a very complicated issue.

Pakistanis who held high hopes after the revival of democracy with the February elections are losing faith and seemingly becoming resigned to the political stalemate.

As the country’s domestic political scene remains unresolved, the trouble on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border poses new challenges. According to the June 11 Washington Post, Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that the al-Qaeda threat in Pakistan represents a “huge challenge” for the United States, but that Pakistan has been failing, in the Post’s words, “to eradicate the safe havens for terrorists and insurgents…” In a front-page story, The New York Times reported on ”a brazen attack [in which] the Taliban fighters assaulted the main prison in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar…freeing around 1,200 inmates. Among the escapees were 350 Taliban members…”

Two days after the June 13 attack, Afghan President Hamid Karzai issued a statement threatening to send his troops across the border into Pakistan to curb the al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters hiding there. Islamabad has strongly protested Karzai’s statement.

Other Regional Developments

India’s two main political parties, Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), are gearing up for next year’s general elections. Both are trying to attract the country’s 167 million-strong minority communities. Being the more secular party, Congress stands a better chance of gaining minority support. Despite its Hindu religious orientation, however, the BJP is bending over backward to court the minority vote. Unfortunately, India’s minorities, including Muslims, are scattered and lack any national leadership. And there is always the danger that extreme Hindu organizations like the Bajrangdal, Shiv Sena and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, all members of the BJP coalition, will resort to sparking anti-minority communal riots to force Hindus to close ranks and support the BJP.

Nepal’s 200-year-old monarchy came to an end when, on May 28, the country’s national parliament voted to become a democratic republic. This is likely to further strengthen the hands of the Nepalese Communist Party, which has been exerting pressure for some time to move the country further left.

Bangladesh is in a state of political suspense. The army, called in to conduct “fair and impartial” elections last year, has not relinquished its hold on power. Instead it announced that there must be a cleansing of the political environment before elections could be held, and arrested hundreds of political leaders on charges of corruption. Several trials are under way and there is no sight of elections being held in the near future.

Prof. M.M. Ali is a specialist on South Asia based in the Washington, DC metropolitan area.