It can now be said unequivocally: Pakistan has a revolving-door democracy; PMs come and go, the President calls the shots. Just glance at last week's events in Islamabad. Prime Minister Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali resigned (read: was sacked), Chaudhary Shujaat Hussain was appointed his successor. This is for an interim period during which the military establishment will find a safe seat from where to get 'miracle man' and finance minister Shaukat Aziz elected to the National Assembly. Then Hussain will resign to let Aziz replace him. But rumour is that even this revolving door will be closed permanently, and a presidential form of government ushered in.
Musharraf's choice of Aziz symbolises his deep distrust of the political class. As a technocrat who served the Saudi royal family and princes of the uae, and also worked with the World Bank in Washington, Aziz is expected to be indifferent to the country's democratic aspirations. But already the members of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Q have started to ask: can Aziz find a safe seat from where he can get elected to the National Assembly?
The speculation has been sparked because PML-Q president Hussain did not mention Aziz in his speech of thanks after he was elected leader of the National Assembly (that is, in effect, the PM). He subsequently made amends at a party meeting after the presidency called reminding him of the script he, Jamali and Musharraf had agreed upon. Hussain has also been requesting the media not to refer to him as 'interim PM'. Reason: the Constitution does not recognise such a post.
The whisper campaign against Aziz has a sharp edge: his detractors say he belongs to the Ahmadi sect, declared non-Muslim here, and consequently can't be PM. Urdu dailies even headlined this rumour, goading Aziz into publicly denying it. His proximity to Washington has riled the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), an alliance of right-wing Islamist parties. With Musharraf already toeing Washington's line, Pakistan, MMA leaders say, will now have a PM whose thinking is anything but 'home-grown'.
MMA leader Qazi Hussain fired the first salvo saying, "The nomination of Aziz is a contempt of not only Parliament but the whole nation." MMA leaders say they are wary of Aziz because he will do Washington's bidding and roll back Pakistan's nuclear programme. Worse, Aziz's antecedents have prompted the Lahore High Court Bar Association to resolve that it will oppose him as PM due to his propensity to promote the US economic agenda.
Musharraf can sell Aziz to Washington and London as the man of 'western values' who is largely credited with having pulled Pakistan out of an economic quagmire. In reality, though, he is a 'non-political face' of Jamali, appointed to defend the President in the National Assembly. Indeed, Jamali was ousted because he would rarely intervene in the National Assembly debates which routinely ripped apart every policy of the army headquarters.
As rumours about Jamali's imminent ouster gathered force in the last three weeks, Musharraf retaliated against the PM's 'betrayal' through complete silence. Jamali was reduced to pathetically appealing to the media to desist from such speculation. The loss of face was decidedly his, but it also devalued Pakistani democracy.
Democracy here will continue to be undermined as long as no systemic measures are taken to balance the trinity of forces in Pakistan. As Senator Aitizaz Ahsan explains, "Our constitutional history is the story of conflict between three elements—the civil and military bureaucracy, the judiciary and the fundamentalists. Only those politicians prepared to display abject subservience to this trinity can survive. Those who choose to challenge or even to question the trinity, there's death, imprisonment or exile.Unless the political and civil society address this distortion in our political-constitutional structure, there is little hope. "
Most have already given up hope. They fear once Aziz is anointed as PM, he'll call for a snap poll. Musharraf will help him engineer a two-third majority. The Constitution will be amended to usher in the presidential form of government. That's been the denouement to all democracy dramas army generals have scripted in Pakistan.