Mr
Tahirul Qadri came, talked, fulminated, and then compromised by paring down his
demands. Was this all good? Yes.
The
march and the sit-in didn’t uproot the government but, in combination with
mainstream and social media coverage, forced it to allow Mr Qadri’s flock into
Islamabad, show restraint, and ultimately concede the normative aspect of Mr
Qadri’s demands and parley with him on those that can be met without getting
into technical difficulties.
This
is a plus for the system and regardless of Mr Qadri’s person or his motives in
embarking on this exercise, has helped consolidate some norms.
It
also initiated a debate, which revolved around what I would describe as
‘Normative’ versus ‘Technical’. I use ‘technical’ instead of ‘constitutional’
deliberately because the latter concept subsumes in itself both normative and technical and is a
function of the higher evolution of a system.
Is
it democratic for someone, outside the political system — Qadri’s flock is not
a registered political party — to try and bring down the democratically elected
government or force it to dissolve itself and announce new elections; or even
to make demands that the government might not be able to concede on grounds of
constitutional technicalities?
These
are important questions and those supporting the ruling coalition, more
specifically, the PPP, constantly raised them. Qadri, for his part, repeatedly
pointed to a system captured by the two main parties and the abysmal record of
governance of the PPP. The thrust of his demands was that the system must be
purged, such that the process of electing peoples’ representatives became
transparent and clean, bringing in those who can be held accountable by the
people.
This
is not a new demand. What was new, though, was the mobilisation of thousands of
people brave enough to face the cold and the rain, camp before the National
Assembly and say ‘enough’!
At
the heart of it lies the question of whether an elected government can invoke
its formation through an electoral process as the necessary and sufficient condition
for it to continue in office for a full term even when it is largely perceived
to have lost the moral high ground?
Indeed,
the Normative Vs Technical debate is grounded in the disconnect between the
spirit and the letter of the Constitution. In other words, to say that it is
enough for a government to be elected for it to continue for the full term may
not be enough.
Being
elected is not an end in itself; it’s a means towards an end. And if it can be
proved that a government has failed, largely, if not entirely, in helping
people meet those ends for which the people had elected it, then we have a
problem. What Qadri did, or what many others have been doing over the years, is
to point out precisely this problem. Also, the Constitution puts five years as
an upper limit for a government; that limit does not mean the government cannot
be dissolved and new elections called before
that limit is reached.
Pakistan
is going through a democratic transition. There’s a sizeable corpus of
literature on transitions with scholars using different frameworks to study
them but there’s one acceptance common to this literature: transitions are
tricky in so far as they deal with breaking away from the old structures and
creating new norms (and structures) without the upheavals associated with
social revolutions. The challenge then is to employ agency to change structural
impediments within the system without destroying the system in toto.
This
is not always easy, which is why transitions have a nasty way of getting
derailed. Ironically, for the most part, this happens because the ‘democratic’
forces use technicalities, devoid of spirit, to frustrate change. It is all
very well to talk about ‘constitutional’ structures, but if the main political
parties work towards — or are seen to be doing so — locking down the system to their advantage, it
should be obvious that the push will have to come from outside.
One
danger with transition pains is that the militaries tend to return to the
political arena. And while the political forces agitate when that happens, the
debate tends to focus on outside intervention instead of looking at why that
might have happened. It is here that Pakistan has shown more maturity in this
round. While the normative is still evolving, even a bad government realises
that it cannot allow external forces to kick the chessboard and start playing
solitaire.
When
an elected government begins to falter in the performance of its actions and
cannot be brought to heel within parliament, people agitate and put pressure.
This is not only their democratic right but also, to the extent that such
agitation highlights a discrepancy between the normative and the technical, is
essential for making the system robust against shocks and external
interventions.
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