Pakistan's Democratic Transition

Change and Persistence

Ishtiaq Ahmad, Adnan Rafiq, Ishtiaq Ahmad, Adnan Rafiq

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317235941
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Politics in Pakistan has traditionally been understood in the context of civil-military relationship. In May 2013, for the first time in history, Pakistan saw an elected government complete a full term in office and transfer power through the ballot box to another civilian government.

In view of such an important development, this book offers critical perspectives on Pakistan's current democratic transition and its implications for national politics, security and foreign policy. It critically analyses the emerging political trends in the country, including their underlying sources, attributes, constraints, and prospects of sustainability. Drawing on history, diverse theoretical perspectives, and empirical evidence, it explains the dynamics of the democratic process, contested borders and spaces, and regionalism. Contributions are from 13 prominent scholars in the field, who provide a wide-ranging analysis of Pakistan's contemporary national and regional challenges, as well as the opportunities they entail for its viability as a democratic state.

Taking the debate on Pakistan beyond the outmoded notions of praetorian politics and security, the book explores the future prospects of civilian supremacy in the country. It will be of interest to students and scholars of South Asian Politics, Political Sociology and Security Studies, as well as policy-makers, diplomats, security experts and military professionals.

1Pakistan’s third democratic transition

Ishtiaq Ahmad

Pakistan has been ruled for most of its history directly by the military. Even during brief periods when the country returned to democratic rule – for instance, during 1971–1977 and 1988–1999 – the military persistently interfered in politics, eventually staging the coups of 1977 and 1999. However, the current phase of democratic rule in Pakistan, which formally began with the 2008 elections, has shown a somewhat different trajectory to the politics-as-usual of the past. The military still calls the shots in core areas of internal security and foreign policy, but has not openly subverted the democratic process. Its traditional domination of political structure and policy apparatus has also been challenged by a number of increasingly assertive civilian political actors. Moreover, politics of the country is no more a zero-sum-game between the civilian government and the military establishment, as the gravity of internal and external challenges has led to growing civil–military convergence over security, economic and foreign policy issues. Pakistan’s post-Musharraf political reality has evolved enough to justify revisiting its complex nature and dynamics. For how the process of political change proceeds in the future will determine what shape its fragile democracy takes and how the country conducts itself in the region.

This chapter begins by placing Pakistan’s praetorian politics in a historical perspective. It then underlines major drivers of change and sources of persistence in its politics during and after the Musharraf era. Subsequent discussion explores the key areas of convergence and divergence in the civil–military relationship at present, as well as the nexus between the democratic process and regional peace, especially with reference to Pakistan’s India policy.

Historical context

Pakistan emerged out of British India in 1947 as a significantly weak country – divided into two wings, eastern and western, separated by 1,000 miles. As compared to the Indian National Congress, the Muslim League, its founding party, did not have a strong political base. Therefore, feudal and civil–military bureaucratic political elites initially dominated the power structure. The war with India over Kashmir soon after Partition enabled the military to dictate national security and defence affairs right at the start. It was able to capture power in 1958, after a tumultuous first decade that witnessed recurrent political crises, including the death of the founding father Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the assassination of first Prime Minister Liaqat Ali Khan, and constant politico-bureaucratic squabbling that produced six more prime ministers.¹ The first military rule of General Ayub Khan eventually paved the way for the first-ever general elections in 1970, which were followed by the break-up of the country within a year.

Since then, Pakistan has seen two prolonged military or quasi-military regimes (General Ziaul Haq, 1977–1988; General Pervez Musharraf, 1999–2008) and reverted to civilian rule thrice (1971–1977, 1988–1999, and 2008–present). The previous two civilian transitions ended with the coups of 1977 and 1999, with one elected prime minister being hanged and the other forced into exile. Throughout the 1990s, despite four elections and an ostensibly civilian set-up represented by an executive and a legislature, the military was able to pull the strings from behind the scenes and pull the plug whenever required. Consequently, four consecutive governments were unable to complete their five-year constitutional tenure, with each lasting between 18 and 30 months. The Eighth Amendment to the 1973 Constitution, especially its Article 58–2(b), a legacy of the Zia era that empowered the indirectly elected president to arbitrarily dismiss the elected government, was the key instrument that enabled the military to dominate politics during this period.²

Beyond these structural constraints, the civilian political elites also suffered due to their reliance on patronage-based politics, lack of governing capacity, inherent inefficiency and corruption in the public sector. They also failed to capitalize on the opportunity for democratic assertion in the 1990s, provided by the erosion of US strategic interests in the Pakistan–Afghanistan region following the end of the Cold War. During this period, not only did the US assistance (that peaked during the Zia regime) stop, but Washington also placed additional restrictions on Pakistan under the Pressler Amendment. It must be noted here that the US has played a major role in scuttling democracy in Pakistan by supporting its successive military regimes and using them as pawns in securing its strategic interests in the region. The 1990s therefore turned out to be a decade of ‘zero growth’, and the civilian governments had to bear the brunt of a faltering national economy. The situation was further compounded when the two mainstream parties, the PPP and PML-N, willingly chose to play the politics of confrontation, thereby directly playing into the military’s hands.³

However, in March 1997, soon after the landslide electoral victory of Sharif, the two mainstream parties displayed unprecedented parliamentary consensus to remove the notorious Article 58–2(b) from the Constitution. Without this article in the Constitution, the military was unable to remove the elected rulers through a pliable president. A subsequent confrontation between Prime Minister Sharif and the Supreme Court, which had until then mostly endorsed the military takeovers under the ‘doctrine of necessity’, also failed to topple the government. The final showdown between the Sharif regime and the military establishment was to occur over India policy. The military was able to control politics and foreign policy by sustaining the fear of security threat from India among people, and portraying itself as the sole saviour of the nation against this ‘existential’ danger. Thus, during the post-Zia democratic transition, any civilian leader attempting to make peace with India was instantly branded as a “national security risk”. In February 1999, Sharif was bold enough to invite Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to Lahore, where the two leaders signed a historic peace accord. This triggered the military’s response in the form of the Kargil conflict with India, and the ensuing civil–military tension eventually ended with the October 1999 military coup by General Musharraf.⁴

General Musharraf’s tactics to monopolize political power were no different from his two military predecessors, Generals Ayub and Zia: Introducing a non-party based local bodies system, which enabled the military regime to claim political legitimacy in the name of ‘grass-root’ democracy and simultaneously marginalize mainstream political parties in the opposition; playing ‘divide and rule’ tactics aimed at pitching political parties against each other; and manipulating the Constitution by introducing anti-democratic provisions. The examples of the use of former tactics include General Ayub’s 1962 Constitution that for the first time introduced the local bodies system of Basic Democracies, and General Zia’s 1985 Revival of the Constitution of 1973 Order that for the first time incorporated Article 58–2 (b).⁵

The seeds of future political instability were thus sown during the military rule, and the civilian regimes that came to power during successive periods of democratic transition had to spend much of their time and effort in reversing the undemocratic legacies of the previous military era. The worsening of the ethnic question during the Ayub era led to the establishment of Bangladesh as well as the intensification of Pashtun and Balochi separatist movements in the remainder of Pakistan, which the Bhutto regime had to crush by force. Ethnic fissures in urban Sindh, particularly Karachi, pitted Mohajirs against other ethnic groups during Zia’s regime and added to sharpened sectarian divisions. The task of managing the consequent ethnic and sectarian violence was left to PPP and PML-N governments in the subsequent decade. During each of the two civilian phases, the military could always rely on a section of the politico-religious establishment to destabilize elected regimes during this phase – as was the case with the Pakistan National Alliance movement against Pakistan’s first elected government of Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in the 1970s, or the mode of confrontational politics that prevailed during much of the 1990s, including recurrent instances of the use of ‘street power’ through long marches by PPP, PML-N and Jamaat-e-Islami.⁶

The Musharraf era was no different in this respect, as it reintroduced the non-party based local bodies system, helped create the Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid (PML-Q) and openly favoured the MQM, the representative party of the Urdu-speaking Mohajir people in urban Sindh, especially Karachi. On the other hand, General Musharraf used heavy-handed tactics in dealing with the ethnically aggrieved people of Balochistan – the 2006 assassination of Balochi leader Akbar Khan Bugti being its highlight and, in fact, a turning point in the province’s ethnic strife in subsequent years. Moreover, through the 2002 Legal Framework Order, the Musharraf government reintroduced the arbitrary provision of the Eighth Amendment in the 1973 Constitution. Despite this, the third period of democratic transition since Musharraf’s demise has had a markedly different political profile than the previous two civilian spells.⁷

Drivers of change

In many ways, the policies pursued by the Musharraf government appear to have created the very conditions that limit the military’s ability to use traditional justifications and instruments to control politics. Combined with visible shifts in Pakistan’s domestic realities and external conditions during the period, they have presented new opportunities for the mainstream national and regional political parties to get their acts together for sustaining the process of democratization, even if the odds against this are still quite heavy.

First, the Musharraf regime defied the pattern of civil–military ties that prevailed for several years during the post-Zia period, whereby the military would support the opposition party to destabilize the ruling party and eventually justify dismissal of the elected government through pliable presidents. It instead chose to victimize the leaderships of both the mainstream political parties, by first trying Nawaz Sharif on charges of treason and then forcing him into exile in Saudi Arabia, and simultaneously keeping Benazir Bhutto out of the country. In this way he reinforced the natural alliance between the two key civilian leaders who had served the country twice as prime ministers and already shown a rare consensus in doing away with a major constitutional aberration back in 1997. This alliance among a majority of the country’s political parties, reflected in a broad political consensus to prevent the democratic process from being disrupted again by exigencies of the military and its political stooges, has emerged as a major feature of the current democratic transition. Since the signing of the Charter of Democracy in 2006, the PML-N, PPP and other political parties have stood together to keep the democratic process on track.⁸ In 2010, they forged an incredible bipartisan consensus to make substantial changes in the structure of the federation under the Eighteenth Constitutional Amendment, giving more powers to the provinces and restoring parliamentary supremacy.⁹ The process of devolution itself constitutes an important barrier to the interventionist streak of a centralized state system – a trend that will over time strengthen, as the process of implementing this amendment completes its course.

Second, even though General Musharraf was directly responsible for triggering the 1999 Kargil conflict with India, and a major military standoff occurred during his tenure in 2001–2002, he publicly pronounced his willingness to compromise Pakistan’s traditional stand on Kashmir settlement through UN resolutions for the sake of peace with India. In 2002, largely under US pressure, he declared that no organization would be allowed to use Pakistani soil for carrying out armed action in Indian-administered Kashmir.¹⁰ In this way the army chief himself limited the military’s potential ability to use the all-too-familiar theme of hostility with ‘belligerent’ India or the dispute over Kashmir as an ‘unfinished chapter’ of Partition as a justification for domestic political control. In any case, India or Kashmir had stopped being a major issue in the election campaigns since the February 1997 election, which the PML-N leadership won with a promise to normalize relations with India. Again in the 2002 elections held under the Musharraf regime, neither India nor Kashmir was a major political issue.¹¹ The same trend persisted during the 2008 and 2013 elections. Despite this, however, the current civilian era has not seen credible progress in Indo-Pak relations, as both the PPP-led and PML-N regimes have chosen not to confront the military on India policy.

Third, although US military and financial support to Pakistan after the terrorist incidents of 11 September 2001 was crucial in sustaining General Musharraf’s regime, its alleged pursuit of a ‘double game’ in the US-led ‘War on Terror’ – as manifested in a hard approach towards home-grown extremist groups committing domestic terrorism and a soft policy towards foreign militant outfits fuelling the Afghan war from bases in tribal areas – did eventually create a serious wedge in US–Pakistan relations. As argued earlier, the United States has traditionally preferred...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Pakistan’s third democratic transition
• 2 Enduring challenges to democracy
• 3 Mapping the ‘Establishment’
• 4 New politics of the middle class
• 5 Social drivers of democratic change
• 6 Military, militancy, and the crisis of governance
• 7 Pluralist society vs. monist state
• 8 Judicial activism, and the rule of law
• 9 Demographic dividend, and democracy
• 10 The Baloch question after the Eighteenth Amendment
• 11 The challenges of a resilient economy
• 12 Civil–military convergence for stability
• 13 Great powers, military supremacy, and persistent contestation
• Index