The "Ganwaar" Politicians By Jyoti Malhotra

In this season of parliamentary discontent in Delhi, take a listen to what the new heroes of the land — civil society activists and, may I have the courage to add, Bollywood heroes — have to say about elected members of parliament. They are “anparh” (illiterate), “ganwaar” (rustic) and have “looted” the country.

Anna Hazare, the self-professed Gandhian, has watched from the enormous stage that has been his world for the last 11 days, reclining on his white pillows and mattress, with an enormous portrait of Gandhi as his backdrop. Now it seems there’s even a statue of Hazare in the back rooms, perhaps in anticipation of sainthood being conferred on him. It’s a marvellous ad campaign, to be sure.

But back to the newfound praise for our parliamentarians from these activists, even Om Puri, whose brilliant cinematic renditions of stories from a poverty-stricken country will remain forever etched in our memory, couldn’t help himself. He, too, fell for the middle-class syndrome that best defines itself with the following phrase: Indira Gandhi was right to impose the Emergency in the mid-1970s because at least the trains ran on time!

This reminds me of the people’s outpouring in favour of army chief general Pervez Musharraf when he mounted his coup against Nawaz Sharif in 1999. Pakistanis, it was said, were so fed up with the grease on which every layer of their nation was being built that they welcomed a man who promised to wipe it clean. At the time, it didn’t matter that he was in uniform.

Make no mistake, the Anna Hazare campaign is predominantly a creation of the television media, which has forced parliament on its knees. Irom Sharmila, a Manipuri woman, who has been on hunger strike these past 11 years against the army’s presence in her native Manipur — she is being force-fed through a tube and divides her time between the hospital and home — is largely ignored by this same media, largely because she hasn’t encapsulated her message in stronger and simpler terms.

Television likes it black and white, at least in India, and you have to understand the power of its simplicity. So when Anna Hazare intelligently tapped into the enormous resentment and anger against a system that Indians know leaks from every sieve, and he couched it into a so-called ‘Gandhian’ struggle against the political class, it was a tailor-made campaign for TV.

Everyone knows that corruption touches our political masters too. Phrases like ‘horse-trading’ abound each time there’s a political crisis in any part of the country. When you hear stories of elected representatives being ‘sold’ for a mere Rs250 million as in Karnataka recently, or the sight of millions of rupees — with the image of Gandhi flagrantly visible on TV — then the shudder courses through all our beings.

But what about epithets like ‘ganwaar’ and ‘anparh’ that the civil society has painted the entire political class with? Fact is, just because I’m literate didn’t make me less corrupt. In fact, one of the reasons the constitution has stood the test of time is because the illiterate and the rustic have contributed beyond measure to building our nation — and they may or may not be corrupt.

Anna Hazare’s greatest contribution has been to put the issue of corruption, back and front and centre. It is his if-you’re-not-with-me-you’re-against-me campaign that smacks of George Bush.

In India, that will increasingly provoke a guffaw. And laughter, as we all know, is the deadliest weapon.

Building a New Civil Society By Yaqoob Khan Bangash

These days we are constantly lamenting the fact that our government is falling apart fast. The law and order situation in the country is deteriorating daily, there is no electricity, clean water, etc. While it is apt that we try to focus and help rectify the problems of governance, we also need to focus on building up a strong civil society. It is perhaps even more important now to have strong, organised and very local level civil society organisations so we can weather this storm.

Pakistan has always had a very weak civil society and a great dearth of civil society organisations. Gauging by the number of registered NGO’s, Pakistan has about 12,000 to 15,000, while India has over three million — we have a few very good organisations, but we need a lot more of them.

When I was a child living in Lahore, we used to know our neighbours. Nearly every evening, a lot of the people from the area used to go walking in a nearby park and as a result chatted with each other and knew about each other’s problems and issues. Now, I only know one family on the street, and even when their house was burgled a year ago, no one had a clue about it for days. This lack of contact, hence interest and concern, within even small localities is adding to the deterioration of the social fabric of the country. This aspect is also adversely affecting our security. Again, when I was a child, the local community had arranged for a night watchman to go around the whole area (of about 50 houses), blowing a whistle. While this was not the best of ways to prevent theft, it was a local community-led initiative and did indeed work for its time. Now, even that level of organisation in the civil society is absent.

This is the time for Pakistan’s civil society to mobilise drastically and organise at the local level — and here, I am not only taking about NGOs but also local level ad hoc organisations and committees.

In 1961, Rushbrook Williams, a former member of the Indian Civil Service and then a fellow of All Souls, Oxford College, wrote a glowing book on Pakistan. The premise of the book was the Basic Democracy model of Ayub Khan. Excepting the obvious motives of the dictator of the time, what was distinctive about the idea was that it organised people at a very local level. Professor Williams extensively toured East and West Pakistan, and saw, in both wings, people involved in development projects at the very local level. Organisation at the ward level was key to making things happen and getting people involved. We need to follow such a plan, but now outside the ambit of the political system — it must be civil society led.

Countries in the West have only developed after strong civil society organisations have filled the gap left by government agencies, which is inevitable in almost every country. For example, in the United Kingdom, there is a very good network of local primary schools, mainly sponsored by the local parish church with primarily parent residents of the area on its board. So while the state provides good secondary and tertiary education, the local community has a significant role at the primary formative level. Similarly, neighbourhood watch committees are very active in most of the UK, providing very ground level support to the government agencies in law enforcement.

In Pakistan, our usual refrain is that the government has failed us and, therefore, anarchy must ensue. While the government is indeed unable to fulfil its very basic roles, we must not forget that there is a very strong role that we as citizens can also play. Almost every aspect of civil life is deteriorating, but rather than becoming despondent, we need to see this as an opportunity to build and strengthen our civil society organisations and networks.

Is Pakistan Suffering from Too Much Democracy? By Jonathan P. Middleton

Out of a fiery and war-torn haze, a new zeitgeist in Libya will rise with tomorrow’s dawn, a future many hope will be one of a functioning democracy. As we see Karachi ablaze, with over a hundred people killed in a week, people are asking, will Pakistan ever escape its own haze and become a functioning democracy? But is that the most important question to ask?

Commentators expend considerable time asking whether Pakistan is ungovernable and, increasingly, the answers appear skeptical. LUMS professor, Mohammad Waseem, has called the situation symptomatic of the institutional weaknesses within the Pakistani state. Some time ago, Medha Bisht, writing for the Kashmir Sentinel, posed the same problems when asking is “Pakistan collapsing?”

The frames used for analysis invariably involve economic factors, foreign intervention, the ‘Three As’ (Allah, America and the Army), colonialism and elitism. The list could go on ad nauseam. These are important, but another way of looking at the recent disturbances in Pakistan is to consider if Pakistan actually has too much democracy rather than a dearth of it.

The thought that a state can have too much democracy appears antithetical to the ideals of freedom and rationality. The reason the question is worth asking is because it allows us to see events in Karachi and elsewhere in another light. Theorists and social commentators often compound two separate but linked ideas about democracy. On the one hand lies what might be called ‘democracy from below’. This can be seen in the more immeasurable ‘feelings’ of democracy. It can take the form of, for example, people understanding the role they play in the decision-making process. Alternatively, it could take the shape of forming groups, civil society in a de Tocqueville an sense, in an attempt to influence the world around them. On the other hand sits what we might call the institutions of democracy, such as parties and elections. What it takes for a successful democracy is the linking of both these forms. However, when they fail to link up and one becomes too powerful for the other, democracy can be weakened.

Pakistan, especially in urban areas, does not seem to have a problem with civic organisations. Political activism is evident on its streets even if you look beyond the activities of local and national political parties. On one end of the spectrum are the numerous religious organisations which are present all over Pakistan. The work of the Edhi foundation, for example, is clearly inspired by the faith of Abdul Sattar Edhi. Such organisations represent sites of microprocesses of democracy. They are where for the majority of the population politics becomes a verb and political action takes place. They may not be democracy with a capital ‘D’ as we usually accept it, but they are democratic with a small ‘d’ in how they encourage public participation in politics. On another end of the spectrum are organisations like Kuch Khaas in Islamabad. Those sitting in the cafe in Kuch Khaas may seem a world away from the ambulance runners of the Edhi organisation and, in many ways, they are. However, both represent the strength of public participation in Pakistan, a healthy sign of the democratic process.

The problem arises because this world of small ‘d’ democracy and that of capital ‘D’ democracy fail to line up in Pakistan. Far too often, local political parties and national parties have failed to represent the people. This leaves a disconnect between what is happening at the local and national arenas, and results in growing frustration in those at the bottom of society. Because the avenues for public participation are limited due to the infrastructural weaknesses of Pakistani democracy, local participation often spills out of the formal avenues of activism and onto the streets.

Thus, what could be contained and channeled if the systems were in place takes the form of unruly activism. The question is not whether Pakistan can function as a democracy. It already does, although an imperfect one. The question is whether it has too much democracy for the institutional systems it has in place. To this the answer is clearly yes. Re-engaging the politics of the street with the politics of the state may not solve all of Pakistan’s problems, but it would be a start.