Adolph Hitler rode to power via the ballot. He then stabilized himself and the Nazi party by first extending its reach and power through parliament. Once he had subverted parliament sufficiently, he and his party machine went on to exercise total power. He would have wanted to extend this total power over the rest of the planet, but countervailing forces united against him, and destroyed Germany.
For some years now, through a different route, democracy in the U.S has been consistently undermined by various steps taken by the mega rich. The most to enhance their arrogation of power has been done by the supreme court. A ruling by this court has done away with all curbs and limits in the way of maximum monetary contribution that an individual or corporation may make to candidates running for political office. From now on therefore it will be virtually impossible for any serious candidate for the U.S presidency, to be anything but a poodle of the mega rich. And once in office, such a president will have to do the bidding of his sponsors. And though the average U.S citizen will continue to vote, the value of his vote, compared to that of a billionaire, will sink into insignificance i.e. for all practical purposes it will spell the end of “one man one vote”, and the U.S will be a plutocracy, if it is not one already.
There will ensue a countervailing force against this plutocracy, but it will take generations to mature.
From the instinct for survival, to the urge to dominate, to arrogation of total power is imprinted in the human DNA, and seems to galvanize the drive towards both democracy and dictatorship at the collective level. When the underprivileged organize to snatch a larger part of the pie, a huge part of the ownership of which is with a privileged few, and the latter use every stratagem to defeat such efforts, there is a resultant tension. This same tension is there when those with privilege seek to take back what they have surrendered to the underprivileged. This tension seems to be ever present in the tug of war between democracy and dictatorship, and altruism enters into the equation only when societies are considerably advanced. Therefore, democracy is sought to be preserved by a system of checks and balances because mere altruism cannot be relied upon to preserve the balance of the system. It is this balance that an aspiring dictatorship seeks to destroy.
This is precisely what is happening in the case of Pakistan. Section 58-2-b was an escape valve which had on previous occasions been used to defuse situations of political tension just like the one which bedevils the country today. But ostensibly this was excised from the constitution for the furtherance of “democracy” and has ended up essentially destroying the balance of contending political forces in an immature democracy. Instead of strengthening democracy which was the claim of those who amended the constitution, this was done to firm up family dictatorships, towards which end the other balancer of the system, the opposition, became “friendly” opposition, which basically meant the sharing of spoils without undue hindrance. The two largest parties also agreed on crafting the election commission machinery in a manner such that the most powerful parties could rig the elections to their satisfaction. In short, the constitution was altered to become a gift that will keep on giving.
Thus, the government of Nawaz Sharif, brought to power through a rigged election, which none of the other political parties nor the media is denying, is a government without political legitimacy. With the sort of power it exercises, it is a family dictatorship, except that its apparel is not a military uniform.
In view of the fact that the conglomerate in the assembly, which constitutes the friendly opposition, insists on calling this “system” a democracy, and conveniently conflates itself with it, this system needs being examined to see if it stands the test of democracy. For this just one test will suffice i.e. various aspects of the Model Town massacre. Just examine this as follows:
- It is not just that the massacre went on for hours, or that the police killed 14 men and women, while full time coverage by various TV channels continued showing it; or that even old people were beaten repeatedly and mercilessly by the police that should concern us the most. What really took the cake was that not a single government minister, all of whom were seeing the gory drama being played out on their TV screens, moved in to stop the massacre.
- The police refused to register the FIR by the aggrieved party for two months, which ought to have been done as a matter of course. Instead, it then then charged the victims of violence, and not the perpetrators!
- Two courts ordered the police to register the FIR by the victims, and when it was finally registered, it was a tampered version of it, in which the police charged the perpetrators with crimes of lesser gravity [overall] than what the victims had been charged for.
- In any halfway decent democracy, the concerned Chief Executive of the province would have tendered his resignation, or at the very least the opposition would have
have asked for such a resignation. In this “system” which the opposition is given so stoutly to defending, not a single member of the opposition has had the courage or the sheer decency to demand such a resignation.
One would have thought however that the government would at the very least have learnt a lesson from what it perpetrated in Model Town, or that their behavior would show some contrition or an iota of humility. But if they are showing any signs of this, it must be in the privacy of their toilets because no one seems to have seen or heard any serious expressions of the same. And if there was any doubt about whether the Model Town massacre was a fully planned affair to put the fear of God in Maulana Qadri, it was dispelled by actions of the Punjab police in Islamabad on the night of 30th August. A select band of this police force attacked the vehicles, equipment, and the crew of every TV channel. But could this have been because of their frustration with the media’s coverage of the present unrest? Unfortunately, this is a doubt that cannot be entertained, because they left out of the reach of their havoc, the equipment of the two TV channels deemed friendly to the government!
Thus, if this is what “democracy” has to say for itself, there should be little wonder that many don’t want it. And many others want the army, being the only force capable of intervening and relieving them of the rigours of this “system.” Even in a flawed democracy, the people should have been looking to the parliament and the courts to provide such relief. Beckoning the army essentially does not mean that people do not want democracy, or that they want the army to rule. But it definitely means that they do not want the type of democracy being perpetrated on them. They would have appealed to the Head Barber of Pakistan, had the barbers of the country been in greater numbers and better organized than the army, to give them this same relief. But because that is not the case they look towards the army.
The sheer arrogance and kleptomania of the ruling house, supported by every party sitting in parliament and supporting the “system” which gives them immunity from their sins of the past, with a promise of many more sins in the future, is an augury of a very bleak future for the country. It is a future in which these people, hiding behind this masquerade of democracy, will destroy Pakistan. A check on their unchecked power must now be put by the supreme court in tandem with the army, so that the balance of the system can be restored, along with the hope that at least a minimal sustainable democracy will limp along in Pakistan, and then mature and flower. If this check on Pakistan’s ruling houses is not enforced, the consequences will be bad, and we are likely to end up with a constitution without a country.