Democracy and agitation

As ‘Guardian’ put it recently, “for democracy to function, you need a civically informed electorate and a fourth estate that functions independently of vested interests. Moreover, you need a genuinely representative electoral system and mechanisms to ensure external, malign actors are neutered. Unfortunately none of the above are entirely possible. They’re Utopian ideals. We can work toward them. We can recognize them as goals. We can improve. That’s the best we can do.”

We Pakistanis are generally realistic about how poorly informed the electorate is on national issues or how independent the media is but recent events in the country, where leader of a political party descended on Islamabad, left little doubt that we are in a class of our own.

The leaders of the ‘Azadi March’ made a spectacle of themselves with irresponsible harangues. They also displayed a lack of concern for political stability in the country just when it is faced with a host of issues in a rapidly evolving milieu of regional and global politics.

One often hears and reads assertions by our politicians about our unique geographical location or our superiority in ideology, as if that counted as substitute for performance. Nor is the presence of an adjective descriptive of Islamic faith in the title of our republic itself a proof of courage and moral excellence. Identifying, acknowledging and an honest self-appraisal should be the first steps in rectifying flaws in our democracy instead of misplaced self-praise.

In moments like these, a thought whiffs across about the much quoted saying by Abraham Lincoln: ‘you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time’. Perhaps, the people of Pakistan have been fooled into the mirage of democracy and in doing so successive governments either blamed military inventions or used the ‘young age’ of our democracy as an excuse for non-deliverance.

In a democracy, a general election is the means to democratic renewal even though this methodology is increasingly coming under stress in countries ranging from Spain, Venezuela, Britain (Brexit), to Egypt.

Successive governments in Pakistan have used ‘people’ to advance their own agendas in the name of democracy, but the people themselves are at a loss to understand where they figure in all this. For as long as one remembers, our parliament has a restrictive agenda and no time for effective deliberation. Any government serious about democracy in the country would have initiated some amendments to the 19th century model of democracy inherited by us from the West which does not really permit any meaningful engagement between voters and the representatives, other than an election every few years and an odd referendum thrown in, as was done by General Pervez Musharraf.

In such a system, only a tiny proportion of the population has a legitimate voice in matters of direct concern to them between successive elections. To make matters worse, rather than encouraging informed and nuanced politics, frequent sit-in politics, as witnessed on various occasions in the last decade, have made our democratic system more adversarial. To be fair to proponents of agitation politics, when an unresponsive electoral system fails to give voters what they need direly, disillusionment and cynicism begins to set in. Political protests are the constitutional right of every party but a lively, thriving democracy can only emerge if there is a reasonable equilibrium between ‘representative’ and ‘participatory’ democracy.

While we are still honeymooning with democracy, elsewhere in the world the perception about this form of governance is slowly but surely undergoing a change. According to Freedom House, an independent watchdog, democracy is in retreat worldwide as tyranny and authoritative regimes ban opposition groups and jail their leaders.

A crisis of confidence in Western democracies in the wake of allegations of Russian influence over the last elections in the US has deepened, with many citizens in an increasing number of countries expressing doubts if democracy serves their interest. Internet and social media tools have become instruments in holding elections – whether free and fair is another debate.

This is discouraging for Pakistan’s democratic experience where people are at the very least losing appetite for parliamentary democracy. In that sense Prime Minister Imran Khan’s government has done well not to stifle recent protests in Islamabad.

Developed democracies are now tinkering with the idea of ‘deliberative’ democracy where, in contrast to representative democracy, citizens are taken on board to solve their problems. In practical terms, it boils down to creating forums where citizens listen to each other respectfully, seek to understand each other’s views, change their hard-wired views when necessary and create a much desired rich and informed democratic culture so dismally lacking in most democracies. Significant progress has been witnessed with this model at local governments’ level in Brazil and Iceland.

This form offers prospects of preventing resources being siphoned off by corrupt politicians as a matter of right and spent where it is most needed in areas like improving sanitation, garbage collection and treatment, clean drinking water, green spaces, health and education and transforming the lives of the poor in a substantial way. If Prime Minister Imran Khan wants to reform our existing unresponsive democratic system, he would do well to give a thought to deliberative democracy next time he decides to take a couple off days for a quiet weekend in Banigala.

French philosopher Michel Foucault said that every exercise of power comes with a cost to the parties exercising that power. Likewise, every dishonest, unethical or cowardly compromise with power also has a cost. Every such act generates a bill that both the compromisers and those who have extracted that compromise will have to pay sooner or later. In Pakistan, sadly, it would be the people who will eventually pay the price of such exercise of power.

The writer is a retired vice admiral.

Email: tajkhattak@ymail.com