Indigo Jo Blogs

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Benazir Bhutto and democracy

by · 28th December, 2007

I’m not the most knowledgeable person about Pakistani politics, and I really have no opinion as to who is behind the murder of Benazir Bhutto, given that fingers are pointing in each direction right now - the government blames al-Qa’ida while Bhutto’s supporters blame the government. Umar Lee and sister Baraka have perspectives on the event that are worth reading (also see these two entries at Muslim Matters: [1], [2]). From speaking to Pakistanis I know, it seems that the event is less distressing for some than what this means for the country: the likely repercussions in terms of civil unrest, and its reflection on the way politics works in Pakistan. Dr M and the person behind Progressive Muslims (formerly PMUNA Debate) are not getting sanctimonious.

However, I had a conversation with a Pakistani brother yesterday evening about the state of the country. I cited an article I’d read by William Dalrymple, a feature on Pakistan which was part of a set of articles marking the 60th anniversary of both countries. Dalrymple argued that, by many standards, Pakistan was ahead of India, notably in the fact that the poor in Pakistan were not as poor as in India. I mentioned this to my friend Omar, who counter-argued that Pakistan had never developed a stable democracy, as India had, having never had military rule in its entire post-independence history. Pakistan has had a cycle of military and civilian rule, in which the country is “rescued” from bad civilian governments by military intervention, so that the lessons of the bad civilian governments are never learned.

I’m not entirely sure that Pakistan’s military rulers are much worse than some of the politicians who have governed India since independence. For one thing, one party dominated the federal government, the Congress party, for most of the period of independence apart from a brief period in the late 1970s, and that was after the “emergency” under which the prime minister, Indira Gandhi, ruled by decree, opposition state governments were dissolved, the arrest and torture of political activists, slum clearances in Delhi which left thousands homeless, and the notorious vasectomy campaign took place. This pattern has not been repeated anywhere in the west. No far-right nationalist party has achieved power in the west in that time either (I am not talking about being a minor party in a coalition here, as with the Freedom Party in Austria; I am talking about as the sole or major party of government). Pakistan is a smaller country than India, with a more homogenous population, which may well have helped it to avoid the terrible communal riots which have afflicted India’s large and small cities; but still, evidence suggests that much of India’s violence is orchestrated, not spontaneous. Pakistan lacks not only the violence of Gujarat in 2002, but also the murderous corruption associated with Bihar.

Pakistan’s failure to maintain democracy, for what democracy is worth when one of the major parties is a dynasty controlled by a wealthy landowning family, is no worse a reflection on Pakistani society than India’s tendency to vote the same party into office for decades and then vote in a bigoted nationalist party is. Neither is it proof that a Muslim society cannot maintain a democracy - there are a number of countries in west Africa, for example, which have managed to main democracies for a number of years since the fall of the post-colonial dictatorships, as has Indonesia since the fall of Suharto in 1998. It might be argued that Pakistanis, and perhaps Muslims generally, prefer “strongmen” to weak governments by cabinets, but then, the same has been said about Russia, and Pakistan’s strongmen have been nothing like as brutal as Stalin or even Putin. The emergency period this autumn aside, Pakistan has had a lively media scene throughout most of the Musharraf regime. This is not usual in militarily-ruled states. Pakistan has not remained a democracy simply because powerful people in Pakistan (and outside it) do not want it to be, not necessarily because the Pakistanis themselves do not - and the same is true of many of the other dictatorships and quasi-democracies in the Muslim world further north and west.

In any case, democracy in the west itself is something about which it seems people feel so secure that they treat it as if it was natural or ancient, when it is nothing of the sort. The franchise was only extended to non-landowning citizens in the late 19th century and to women in the late first quarter of the 20th (in some places, such as parts of Switzerland, not until the 1970s). In parts of western Europe, it only firmly established itself in the 1970s; in Russia, it never has done. The usual pattern in the west is of a “right” and a “left” party, with a third party which either holds the balance of power because the two major parties refuse to coalesce, as has often been the case in Germany, or is crippled by an electoral system which refuses it a share of parliamentary seats proportional to its share of the vote, as has been the case in the UK. Thus, the system usually delivers minority rule, a compromise westerners have made which other peoples might not be willing to. In a country where parties are ethnically or regionally based, a government based on the 40% share of the vote earned by an ethnically-based party might lead to civil war.

As William Dalrymple pointed out, Bhutto’s popularity among western politicians has much to do with her being a west-friendly personality rather than for whatever she might have offered her own people. Her first language was English, not Urdu or Sindhi, and she was educated by an English governess, Catholic convent schools, Oxford and Harvard. Much like Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma, whose political career has been even more futile than Bhutto’s, she was an attractive woman with very western sensibilities and personal connections. Her assassination should be taken as an opportunity by the Pakistan People’s Party to become what their name implies, rather than a political vehicle for yet another wealthy product of a secularised landowning dynasty.

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