The Hindu : Promoting the military's interest

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Aug 10, 2002

Opinion

Opinion - Editorials

Promoting the military's interest

THERE ARE FIRM indications that Pakistan's President, Pervez Musharraf, is determined to go ahead with certain constitutional amendments aimed at institutionalising the military's dominance over the power structure. Gen. Musharraf has adamantly insisted that he will restore constitutional provisions that will enable Presidents to dismiss Prime Ministers and dissolve National Assemblies. An enabling mechanism of this sort was first inserted into the 1973 Constitution (currently suspended) by an earlier military dictator, and its deletion from the basic law fulfilled a part of the democratic aspirations of the people of Pakistan. As such, the reinsertion of such a provision does not mark merely an adverse twist in Pakistan's tortuous march to a more wholesome constitutional order. It is a deliberate reversal of the progress that Pakistan's democratic forces had made in their unfortunate history. To go by the record of the past it might take another decade for Pakistan's democratic forces to assert their rights against a President who would be either unelected or elected by a very narrow base of voters.

If a revival of the President's real (as distinguished from the symbolic) supremacy in Pakistan's constitutional scheme is bad enough, the other amendment that Gen. Musharraf is insistent on foisting on Pakistan will further strangulate the prospects for a true democratic order. The proposal to provide an over-arching role for the National Security Council (NSC) is nothing but a scheme to entrench the military in the highest echelons of the country's decision-making apparatus. By way of throwing a few sops to the democratic forces, and perhaps international opinion as well, Gen. Musharraf has indicated that he might be willing to consider an expansion of the civilian component of the NSC. This would be a transparently cosmetic exercise since the three service chiefs and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff will, as they have in the past, most certainly act in concert against the elected civilians. As the saying goes in Pakistan, the military is the country's most strongly organised political force and this component of the NSC would be easily able to hold its own against civilian leaders from the four provinces who could very possibly belong to different political parties.

Gen. Musharraf has justified these amendments on the grounds that they are in the national interest. Pakistan's autocrats of the past, whether thrust up from the ranks of the bureaucracy or self-imposed with the military's backing, have demonstrated often enough that they are quite incapable of distinguishing between the national and their own personal or partisan interests. Gen. Musharraf is perhaps a more sincere man than his predecessors but that is small guarantee that he will be able to impartially perceive the true national interest when the military gets locked into a confrontation with the elected civilians. Equally pernicious is the General's argument that the re-casting of the constitutional scheme cannot be postponed till the election of a civilian government (a matter of a mere two months if all goes well) since the re-ordering of the relative balances between institutions is necessary to protect the economic and political reforms he has undertaken. It is not merely that many Pakistanis do not appear to believe that Gen. Musharraf's regime has ushered in such far-reaching and positive changes as would need the protection of a special constitutional arrangement. No programme for fundamental, political, economic and social changes can be sustained if the public at large is not committed to it and no citizenry can give such a commitment unless they can believe that they are in control of the process of reform.

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