'Democracy' in action - Pakistan

Pervez Musharraf has been re-elected. He won an overwhelming victory, which would point to a truly massive level of popular support, if it wasn't for the fact that the election had slightly less legitimacy than Joshua Norton's claim to be Emperor of the United States.

The President of Pakistan is, in line with the Presidential Election Rules, 1988, elected indirectly. The people of Pakistan do not get to vote for the president they desire. The electorate is instead made up of the Senators, National Assembly Members and members of the four Provincial Assemblies. Elections to the Provincial Assemblies are direct (with some seats reserved for women and religious minorities and distributed through a system of proportional representation) and this is also the case with the National Assembly.

The Senate is somewhat more complicated. Each Provincial Assembly picks 22 Senators, four of whom must be women and another four of whom must be Islamic scholars, whilst the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas select another eight. The final four Senators are elected from Islamabad, of whom one must be a woman and another an Islamic scholar.

In many ways it appears to resemble the U.S. Senate of the late 19th century - no direct election and a massive regional imbalance - Punjab is about eight times as populous as Balochistan, but receives no more representation in this chamber.

This problem is exacerbated in the election of the President. Because even with this electorate of slightly over a thousand voters, it is not one man one vote. Rather there are 702 votes. 442 of these votes come from members of the Senate and National Assembly. The other 260 are divided equally between the four provinces, which benefits the North-West Frontier and Balochistan at the expense of Punjab and Sindh (the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas and the Capital Territory are almost completely marginalised).

Obviously, this is not a fair system. It should clearly be reformed. But that doesn't even rank in the top five reasons why these elections are a "farce, a mockery and a fraud upon the electorate" That quote is from the Electoral Reforms Commission of Pakistan's description of elections in 1956. Read on and I'll tell you why things are no better now.

Let's begin with the most important point: Pervaz Musharraf is a military dictator. As such, his election can never really be free and fair. Dictatorship is the very worst system of government, even worse than monarchy. Whilst monarchs are usually fundamentally unsuited to rule and incapable of relating to their subjects and often stupid and capricious to boot, they do at least have the advantage that they owe their position to inertia as much as to anything else and therefore do not always have to rely on force. The same is not true of dictators. Name me one benevolent dictator and I'll slap you silly, abuse your intelligence and parentage and be forced to brutally disabuse you of your misconceptions.

With a dictator, there is always at the very least the veiled threat of force, since they are well aware of the principle that he who lives bhy the sword dies by the sword. And considering that their power was originally based on overruling the democratic decision of the people on the basis of military force, one cannot have an election including a military dictator which is free of intimidation. It just will not happen.

And Musharraf is still a military dictator, have no doubt about that. Knowing from history (twice) and his own personal experience that the role of Chief of the Army Staff was an ideal one from which to launch a coup, he maintained that role, procuring a legal decision to allow him to subvert the eligibility rules for President rather than to give up his nice shiny uniform.

He promised to give up his military office if elected President. But think about that for a minute. That is not the action of a man seeing the value of democracy. That is a fairly simple statement: "Elect me President, or I'll just launch another coup."

Then there's the electorate. Quite aside from the blatantly flawed nature of the college (probably a deliberate decision on the part of the hideously corrupt Pakistani civilian elite, most of whom originate from a small number of semi-feudal Punjabi families), most of the members of that institution were elected in 2002, in elections that were widely condemned for being rigged. New elections to the National Assembly are scheduled for either later this year or early 2008. But Musharraf is doubtful as to whether he'd be able to rig the polls enough this time, so he'sgot himself elected by a wholly unrepresentative and illegitimate lame dog body.

Add to that the fact that Musharraf is perceived by his people as the most corrupt Pakistani politican ever (and how he could possibly manage such an amazing feat, short of sucking off Satan for lottery tickets, is a mystery to me) and that he's utterly failed to drive the Taliban from its bases in NWFP and FATA whilst angering religious parties through his policies and double-dealing and it's clear that General Musharraf is not somebody that it makes any sense to support.

Benazir Bhutto, Nawaz Sharif and the rest of the Pakistani establishment are all crooks and the descendants of crooks, who really don't represent their supporters. I frankly don't know how you'd get any real democracy for the citizens of Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi and doing so would probably unleash the Islamists, who aren't our kind of people at all. Having said that, however, all that Musharraf does is make the almost inevitable breaking of the dam, when elements aligned with political Islam will take power in Pakistan, likely to be that much worse.

I vaguely remember a time when Bush used to talk of the importance of democracy and my own government talked about having an "ethical foreign policy", before it turned out that it was more profitable to be studiously amoral and democracy might mean your candidate would lose. Considering what a liability Musharraf now is, it'd be nice if they went back to those ideals and announced their refusal to recognise his election as legitimate.

Whilst I'm at it, it'd be nice if tomorrow morning a cure for AIDS and cancer was announced, Bin Laden declared he was closing down Al-Qaeda to concentrate on flower arranging, Hu Jintao was run over by half a dozen buses and there were a couple of supermodels in my bed.