By Ayaz Amir
Ayaz Amir is a distinguished Pakistani commentator and member of parliament
17 July 2009
This nation suffered Field Marshal (self-appointed) Ayub Khan as its ruler for eleven years, and General Ziaul Haq for another eleven years, and Pervez Musharraf for eight and a half years. There was opposition to their rule at the popular level but it was to little avail when pitted against the army’s divisions. Power slipped away from Ayub and Musharraf when they could no longer count on the army’s unquestioning support.
Zia went because of other causes. But it is a strange characteristic of our chattering classes—whose supreme vocation in life, after the worship of Mammon, is the nurturing of conspiracy theories—that while they resign themselves all too readily to military rule, their impatience starts bursting at the seams as soon as there is a democratic government in place.
For the folly and ultimate futility of military rule their patience is unbounded. But surveying the imperfections and shortcomings of democracy — which are many — it is their anger which is limitless. Thus we see the strange spectacle of those who not only saw nothing wrong with Musharraf, but indeed served him loyally throughout his years in power, transformed suddenly into merciless critics of the present order.
This is no argument against criticism. If those who hold democracy’s cup in their hands play out their shenanigans, they must be taken to task. But we must remember at the same time that while the alternative in Britain to Gordon Brown is David Cameron, and the alternative in the US to the wild fantasies of neo-con Republicanism is someone like Barack Obama, what usually comes after the wholesale trashing of democracy in Pakistan is the march of the Triple One Brigade.
President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gillani are easy targets, not least because of their various shortcomings. It is perfectly legitimate to target them as both could do with extended lessons in vital aspects of adult education. But given our past and the ambitions of the Bonapartist class, we must beware of the distinction between those thrown up by democracy and democracy itself.
No calamity could be greater than George Bush. But America waited for an election to rubbish his legacy. Our chattering classes show not the same forbearance. And it’s not as if Zardari alone is the problem. If Nawaz Sharif had been in power I can bet anything the chattering classes would have ganged up against him.
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Zardari has his failings and who can deny them? Both he and Gillani are accidents of destiny, gifts from the heavens at their most sardonic. But they are also products of a democratic process and therefore to be tolerated until the next turn of the political wheel.
And while we may have much to lament as far as our present heroes on deck are concerned, we must learn from our past and apply some rein to our collective impatience, restraining some of the nihilism that we often demonstrate towards our institutions and democratic processes.
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