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 Liberals love a dictator?
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Posted on 05-18-05 11:55 PM     Reply [Subscribe]
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An interesting article.

At the end of the day, as one travels/works more and more across South Asia and
gets to know the young and the established opinion-makers, business elite, cultural mavens, civil society members and the like . . . and sees the rates of progress (or lack thereof) made by these various countries, it becomes clear (at least to me!) that virulent patriotism notwithstanding, we in Nepal are NOT so different from the Pakistanis, the Indians, the Bangladeshis and the Sri Lankans.

How they run or not run their institutions is similar to how we run or not
ours.

oohi
ashu

********************

Where liberals love a dictator

Pakistan's experience of democracy as a kind of elective feudalism is a reminder that the ballot box by itself is no panacea

-http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1485461,00.html

William Dalrymple
Tuesday May 17, 2005
The Guardian

If it has achieved little else, George Bush's "war on terror" has at least succeeded in mating some unlikely bedfellows. Who, a few years ago, could imagine the strange coupling of the Labour party and the neocons? Or the love-in between the House of Bush and the House of Saud?

An equally bizarre alliance is now to be found in Pakistan. The liberal elite, somewhat to its astonishment, has suddenly found a new affection for the military dictator, General Pervez Musharraf. Travel through the country today, talk to the journalists and opinion-makers, and you will find surprisingly little enthusiasm for the resumption of full democracy, which - under US pressure - looks likely to take place in 2007.

It is not that Pakistan's liberals approve of military dictatorships. These were the people who took to the streets to resist General Zia ul-Haq. But the democratic politics of Pakistan throughout the 1990s proved so violent, so corrupt and so socially and economically disastrous that Musharraf's rule is now widely regarded as the least awful option.

Pakistan provides a depressing, but highly significant, example of just how flawed a democracy can be in a developing country - and a useful reality check at a time when Bush and Tony Blair seem to have persuaded themselves that democracy is a magic wand that can provide an instant solution to all the ills of the Islamic world.

Certainly, few middle-class Pakistanis have much relish for the return of Benazir Bhutto or Nawaz Sharif, the leaders who took Pakistan to the brink of collapse in the 90s. There are good reasons for this. Ten years ago, at the height of Bhutto's rule, the corruption monitoring organisation Transparency International named Pakistan as the second most corrupt country in the world.

At the same time, Amnesty International accused the government of massive human rights abuse, with one of the world's worst records of custodial deaths, extrajudicial killings and torture. Moreover, Bhutto and her husband were charged with plundering the country to buy European estates and townhouses.

It was difficult to imagine Bhutto's successor, Nawaz Sharif, making a bigger hash of things, but he quickly succeeded, harassing his political opponents, dismissing judges and threatening journalists. The Friday Times editor, Najam Sethi, was abducted from his home on Sharif's orders; the police denied all knowledge of his arrest until a series of demonstrations eventually forced them to release him.

Such was the harassment suffered by the leading newspaper, Jang, that it was able to produce editions only one page long. Sharif and his brother bussed in hundreds of thugs to ransack the supreme court. Soon afterwards the chief justice was forced to resign under a barrage of threats.

Sharif also moved Pakistan closer to Islamist policies, entrenching sharia in the legal system. Meanwhile, Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency presided over the growth of jihadi groups, believing them to be the most cost-effective way of tying down the Indian army in Kashmir and exerting Pakistani influence in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the economy teetered towards collapse.

Behind this succession of crises lay the bigger problem of a fundamentally flawed political system where land-owning remains the only social base from which politicians can emerge. The educated middle class - which in India seized control in 1947 - is in Pakistan still largely excluded from the political process.

As a result, in many of the more backward parts of Pakistan the local feudal zamindar can expect his people to vote for his chosen candidate. Politicians tend to come to power more through deals done within Pakistan's small feudal-army elite than through the will of the people.

In contrast, Musharraf's record in bringing the country back from the brink has been impressive. Under the urbane eye of Shaukat Aziz, formerly the vice-president of Citibank and now Musharraf's prime minister, Pakistan is enjoying a construction and consumer boom, with growth approaching 7% - although some of this has been generated by the mass repatriation of Pakistani drug fortunes after the tightening of money-laundering regulations in the US and the Gulf. Sectarian violence is down, the jihadis have been restrained and the ISI, which encouraged them, has been partially reformed. Press criticism has been tolerated and the airwaves freed up.

It has certainly not been an unblemished record. Musharraf has made many unwise compromises with the Muslim ulema, and in two provinces has entered into an alliance with the hardline Islamist MMM. Musharraf has failed even to attempt sorting out the country's disastrously inadequate education and health system; instead the army is spending money on a fleet of American F-16s. The Pakistani human rights record remains abysmal. But few can really dispute that Musharraf's rule has brought Pakistan better economic governance and a greater degree of stability and press freedom than it has enjoyed for many years.

The wider lesson to be drawn from this is that while US support for democracy is preferable to its previous policy of bolstering client autocracies, electoral democracy is not on its own an automatic panacea. As Pakistan shows, rigged, corrupt, unrepresentative and flawed democracies without the strong independent institutions of a civil society - a free press, an independent judiciary, an empowered election commission - can foster governments that are every bit as tyrannical as any dictatorship. Justice and democracy are not necessarily synonymous.

In Pakistan, democracy has meant a kind of elective feudalism. In Lebanon, the eccentric electoral system, rigged in the Maronites' favour, has made it impossible for the majority Shia community to achieve power. In Iraq, the electoral system fails to reflect the popular mandate, and the means by which it was imposed - down the barrel of an American gun - has led many of the Sunni community to disfranchise themselves.

It is a similar situation in Afghanistan, where the elected government of President Hamid Karzai has as bad a record of torture and custodial deaths as any of its predecessors (although much of the worst torture is taking place in US bases, outside Afghan sovereignty). As Dr Sima Samar, the leading human rights activist in Afghanistan, put it in the New York Review of Books, "democracy and freedom are simply meaningless without justice and the rule of law".

? William Dalrymple is the author of White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in 18th-Century India

www.williamdalrymple.com


 
Posted on 05-19-05 5:10 AM     Reply [Subscribe]
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It gives me a feeling that by posting this message in
sajha.com, Ashu is trying to send a message to the
current govt. of Nepal, that Ashu is changing / shifting
his position in favor of the current govt.: dictatorship
under KG's hat.

I wish that I am wrong.
GP
 
Posted on 05-19-05 6:11 AM     Reply [Subscribe]
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For similar things to happen in Nepal, the King has to put where his mouth is. Paras has to be circuimcized from his juvenile behaviour. The King should put all the wealth of Birendra and Family in a Trust to support the fight against Maoists or of that sort. He should reduce his expenses from 67 crore to 1 crore and be a leader of the people. He should find newer faces in his cabinet, outdated Tulsi Giri, Bista and the ghosts of Panchayat is not going to do the work.

He has got to come up with a new plan. Instead of slandering the politicians in his speech and show his distaste of them publicly, he should play the game of getting them from behind, but look good on the outside. He should do a better home-work with the International community. He should give out more speech praising the janata rather than himself (hamro purkhako birta ho Nepal kind of speech is NOT working)

I think Gyanendra (a lot of people think he is the smartest among the three sons of Mahendra), I think he is dumb and arrogant, and rather than succeed, he will be the last King of Nepal just like the Jyotish of Nepal have predicted.

Even if Gyanendra had done everything right, I still would want Democracy in Nepal. I rather wish the politicians change and understand the concept of democracy rather than rot it in their speech.
 
Posted on 05-19-05 9:26 AM     Reply [Subscribe]
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sardarsing where ur bro zakhim or was it zalem singh??
 
Posted on 05-19-05 1:36 PM     Reply [Subscribe]
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"But the democratic politics of Pakistan throughout the 1990s proved so violent, so corrupt and so socially and economically disastrous that Musharraf's rule is now widely regarded as the least awful option."

The least awful option is the key. Of course it would be ideal to have the dictator mend his ways to be a more of a benovolent dictator rather than a conkniving businessman who's solely looking after his interests.
 
Posted on 05-19-05 1:43 PM     Reply [Subscribe]
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ringa ringa roses, pocket full of poses, we hush and push we fall down
 
Posted on 05-20-05 8:50 AM     Reply [Subscribe]
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GP-ji wrote:

"It gives me a feeling that by posting this message in
sajha.com, Ashu is trying to send a message to the
current govt. of Nepal, that Ashu is changing / shifting
his position in favor of the current govt.: dictatorship
under KG's hat."

****

GP-ji,

I understand your concerns.
But allow me to clarify.

I found the article -- published in a liberal British newspaper by a South Asia-loving liberal -- INTERESTING enough to be shared with Sajha readers.

Tetti ho, just an attempt to add a different view.

Personally, just on the basis of this one article, I would NOT try to draw sweeping parallels between Pakistan and Nepal to approve the system of one or the other.

But citing this article as an example, I would say that:

1) All that we know about democracy (the usual mainstream liberal stuff) appears to
be NOT as straightforward in practice as we assume things about it in theory.

2) It's in our collective interest to read up on South Asian history (recent and ancient) to understand how institutions have become what they have become to promote or hinder liberal democracy in these countries.

At this point, it's not clear whether what they have in Pakistan is a necessary short-term measure or an alternative system or something else altogether.

What is interesting is that even liberals there see what they hahave now as a BETTER alternative than what they had had in the past in the name of democracy. That, to me, is quite interesting thing to think more deeply.

oohi
"a non-dogmatic student of democracy"
ashu





 
Posted on 05-20-05 11:01 AM     Reply [Subscribe]
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By posting this article, the username is trying to educate us on multiplicity of civil societies. Which proves, once again, that Ashu sees more angles than you think.

however,

It is ridiculous to compare the millitory dictatorship with the democratic rule in Pakistan within the past six years or so because the latter did not exist. To claim that what they have is better than what did not exist (so could've been anything) is a pointless excercise and all liberals ought to know that.

It is a great tool for apologists though. It gives them a chance to pick out parts of history (or worse, the trajectory of history) to justify the present. Not that I'm accusing Ashu of doing that. His intent is well hidden, which is always a sure thing with open minded people. New shit come to light every day. Gotta reserve judgement.

 


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