National Unity Tested by Regional and Religious Pressures '

After Musharaff ended, the PPP resisted to restoring Chaudhry and 60 other judges because they would re-open corrnption cases against top PPP leaders.

President Zardari held an office that ostensibly provided him immunity from judicial proceedings but he appeared unsure whether Chaudhry and his team of judges would accept this legal position.

And so, within months of the February 2008 polls, the same political coalition that forced Musharraf from power reactivated itself.

The movement was joined by Nawaz Sharif and opposition leaders with public support as:

• a ‘black coat revolt’ (named after the lawyers’ attire) and
• a ‘middle-class uprising’

This campaign had a single-point agenda to restore the judges.

But it came to reflect wider liberal-democratic aspirations. This was spearheaded by middle-class professionals, with politicians following them rather than leading this extraordinary urban upsurge.

In March 2008, the movement reached a climax when Sharif threatened a ‘Long March’ on Islamabad.

The Army Chief, General Kayani, and American officials separately intervened to persuade both Zardari and Sharif to step back.

The crisis was defused when Zardari agreed to reinstate Choudhry and the other judges.

A re-empowered judiciary aided by a more influential media had changed the country’s power balance.

The campaign:

• energised Pakistan’s urban society
• supported a secular principle in the midst of militancy.

Continuity and Change in the Post-Musharraf Democratic Era

The post-2008 showed that politics stays the same.

The 2008 polls returned the PPP to power heading a coalition at the centre and the PML-N in the Punjab.

Familiar regional and ethnic parties secured provincial dominance: ANP in KP and the MQM in Sindh.

Members or scions of prominent political dynasties won seats to the national and provincial assemblies. This line-up testified to the continuing electoral ascendancy of the traditional political elite of landowners, urban businessmen, biradari chiefs and other local influentials.

Parties-with the notable exception of the MQM, which describes itself as Pakistan’s only middle class political organisation-still preferred to award tickets to members of this elite rather than from the rising middle class.

The most striking aspect of continuity was the fact that the top two elected positions in government-Prime Minister and Foreign Minister-were filled by scions of the Gilanis and Qureshis, two of southern Punjab’s leading landowning families who are also the Sajjada Nashins (keepers of the Sufi shrines) of their region, a spiritual role that they use to buttress their feudal power.

Yusuf Raza Gilani and Shah Mahmud Qureshi’s ascent to these offices was a reminder of how little election politics had changed since 1947.

By-elections in 2009 and 2010 also showed similar trends.

These reaffirmed the dominance of the country’s 2 major parties.

But this has to be tempered by the fact that a significant chunk of the electorate did not vote at all.

Non-voters accounted for as much as 56% of the electorate in 2008.

Although fewer ballots are usually cast in by-elections the turnout of 20% (in a Lahore seat in March 2010) and marginally more elsewhere denotes a phenomenon that merits more attention than it has received.

This voter disinterest in the political process is from their rejection of a narrow choice that reflects neither their interests nor their aspirations.

The rural elite has continued to dominate elections in spite of greater urbanisation because constituencies are delimited on the basis of old data and boundary demarcations which reflect the distribution of kinship or biradari groups especially in the Punjab.

As the latter suits the major parties it has rarely been questioned.

The 2008 election was conducted on the basis of the 1998 census.

There has been no census since. A fresh census and elections predicated on new numbers would shift the balance towards the urban areas challenging the power of politically influential rural families.

Until there is a comprehensive delimitation of parliamentary seats (rather than tweaking before elections) to reflect new economic and social realities, electoral politics will continue to lag behind changing national dynamics.

Can closing the gap between representational politics and a changing society invest the polity with the means to tackle and surmount the fault lines that have been identified? Pakistan’s checkered history shows that clientelist-based politics have failed to provide the governance that meets the needs of the broad populace.

Politics embedded in narrow transactional forms of mobilisation and which reinforce patrimonial structures lack the capacity to address Pakistan’s complex challenges.

This is because political clientelism, as emphasised before, has a patronage not policy focus, encourages rentier behaviour as well as corrupt practices. This form of politics places the accent on the local and hobbles thinking about larger, national issues.

It is not geared to resolving issues of modern governance or structural economic problems that warrant urgent policy attention. Clientelist politics are in fact dysfunctional to the needs of a modernising society, however uneven that process.

Moreover clientelism operating in an environment of scarcity-in resources and opportunity-makes for uncompromising politics and bitter conflict that serves to reinforce instability and contributes to making the country more ungovernable.

But if politics remains trapped in these structures and partisan feuds that are increasingly out of touch with the people how can Pakistan be better governed?

While it is important not to overstate ongoing changes including rising middle-class clout-or suggest that entrenched political patterns can easily be transcended they do open up opportunities.

Pakistan’s middle class may well in the years ahead become a significant political force and be able to impact more on national life.

Greater ‘connectivity’ in society is already changing the way people relate to and think about politics and governance. Television viewership for example is estimated to have risen to over 80 per cent of households and this is making people better informed and more aware of their rights.

Some analysts have correctly portrayed these developments as having produced a stronger nation and society in the context of a weaker state. Others including perceptive foreign observers have seen the expansion of the lower middle class to have increasingly redefined Pakistan’s national identity.

The ‘Mehran man’, wrote a foreign journalist who identified the growth of a more prosperous lower middle class with ownership of cars like the Mehran (local name for the Suzuki Alto), has a satellite television and is more politically conscious. Their rise signifies ’the shift away from the rural elites once co-opted by colonialism.’

These developments have been driven by the shift in the economic centre of power in the past decade. An important indicator of this is the declining share of agriculture in national output. This has fallen from 40% in the 1970s to almost half that at the end of the 2000s. The urban sector now accounts for much of GDP; rising from 52 per cent in the 1960s to 78 per cent in 2010.

These economic realities together with technology-induced changes and the information revolution have made the political centre of gravity more diffuse.

85The changing patterns of political engagement are also evident in the growth of a more diverse and vibrant civil society. As space has opened up for newer civil society organisations to emerge these have come to reflect the interests and concerns of a more politically aware urban society and enabled the middle class to press their views and interests with greater vigour.

The fast-expanding broadcast media has offered a new and more potent platform to citizens to raise issues and mobilise opinion. A more effective ‘opposition’ or ‘watchdog’ has emerged from within civil society working in tandem with the media.

This informal coalition has held the government to account, subjected executive action to rigorous oversight, helped to set priorities and suggested policy courses for national problems that parties have singularly failed to do either out of lethargy or lack of political will.

The national consensus that emerged against militancy in 2009 was forged and sustained in this manner. Government missteps in the energy sector exemplified by the controversial rental power projects as well as instances of corruption were also exposed this way.

While the democratic dividends of these newer forms of political activism are evident, the key question is whether these can go beyond informal, sporadic checks on executive conduct or single-issue political campaigns?

Can the newer politics transform traditional party structures?

They include a modicum of economic stability and at the very least a halt to the downward economic spiral.

This will also depend on the continuity of the political and democratic process, because all too often military rule has simply frozen the status quo and put brakes on its natural evolution, closing potential avenues for political reform.

The role of external actors and their regional policies will be no less important.

An inability to find an early political end to the Afghan war along with a prolonged Western military presence in the neighbourhood can, apart from their other destabilising effects, distort political dynamics in Pakistan in different ways.

For example, by reinforcing the ruling elite’s dependence mind-set that acts as a disincentive for reform and by propping up status quo forces in the name of stability.

Another consequence could be to provoke a nationalist backlash that might make for xenophobic tendencies among the middle class and weaken its modernist impulses.

There are 5 possible scenarios.

1. Muddling through

This means more of the same, with politics stuck in a traditional groove.

The muddling-through scenario however is untenable for at least 2 reasons:

1. Governance challenges have come to a head and are no longer amenable to tinkering or marginal half steps.

The more urgent reform is delayed the greater the risk that problems will become intractable.

2. A more urbanised society will continue to press for change.

This is because:

• it is unlikely to settle for the continuance of the status quo
• it has now discovered that organised action lets it demand greater accountability and responsiveness to their economic and political interests.

2. Military-backed civilian technocratic rule.

Such an arrangement is temporarily able to halt the national slide, it is unable to resolve the country’s deep-seated problems because that requires political consensus.

The political alignments in this scenario will so closely mirror that in the muddling through model that it will be unable to overcome traditional clientele politics and therefore impede rather than foster the modernisation of governance.

3. Social breakdown under the weight of a systemic crisis.

This is frequently peddled by outsiders as state collapse followed by a takeover by Islamic extremists.

This alarmist scenario is based more on fear or ignorance than empirical reality.

This scenario can also be ruled out because it rests on an exaggerated view of the strength and cohesiveness of extremist forces.

4. The established parties adjust to socio-economic changes by turning to issue-based politics and evolve into modern political organisations

Sharif’s urban-based Muslim League is better positioned to do this.

But the party is:

• dynastic or personality-dominated
• has a mercantile base of urban support
• built around clientelist networks of local influentials, and clan or business dynasties.

5. A middle class-led coalition spearheading an agenda of reform that aims to make governance more effective, accountable, and responsive

The elements of such a coalition were foreshadowed in the lawyers-led movement of 2007-09.

That agitation was a single-issue campaign. In this scenario, such a coalition would have to be built on a more durable basis to pursue a broader agenda.

The prospects of such an outcome may not appear strong in the short term but it would be a mistake to minimise the stirring for change that continues to manifest itself in many different ways and whose expression can be heard daily in the media.

This urge for change may yet crystallise into a new politics that connects governance to public purpose.

It holds the promise of tapping the resilience of the Pakistani nation and establishing a political foundation for good governance that the country has long deserved but found so elusive.