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Pakistan opts for a strong president
Zardari has the popular mandate as well as a government free of internal tensions
- By Tanvir Ahmad Khan, Special to Gulf News
- Published: 00:03 September 8, 2008
- Image Credit: Nino Jose Heredia/Gulf News
Since 1965, September 6 has been commemorated as the day when Pakistani forces fought desperately to blunt a major Indian offensive aimed at the city of Lahore in a war that should never have taken place. Henceforth, the day will also mark Asif Zardari's election as the 12th president of Pakistan, the culminating event in yet another full democratic restoration in the country.
Several dates stand out in his triumphal march to the citadel of power. Human ingenuity and providence alike seem to have shaped this fateful trajectory.
On December 27 when Benazir Bhutto fell to assassins in a mysterious plot that the Pakistan Government wants the United Nations to help unravel, her husband, Asif Ali Zardari found himself confronted with the difficult task of controlling the retaliatory violence that had gripped Bhutto's home province of Sindh. He acted with courage and imagination and the bereaved Pakistan Peoples Party appointed him as the effective co-chairman, while his son, Bilawal, the eventual chairman, pursued his studies at Oxford.
On February 18 this year, the people of Pakistan belied many dark prophecies and handed down an electoral verdict that knocked out the power base of a dictatorship that had lasted almost a decade. Pakistan would have been spared much pain if Pervez Musharraf had gracefully accepted this verdict and offered to continue as a constitutional president, an arrangement that the PPP might have gone along with in the spirit of a past understanding.
It brought Musharraf face to face with the first ever impeachment of a head of state in Pakistan which he averted with the help of some friendly outside powers by resigning on August 18.
Regrettably, the PPP-Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz (PML-N) coalition that had forced him out of office itself crumbled on August 25, adding to political uncertainty. Against this background, the PPP decided that it would itself hold the offices of the president and prime minister and the majority of the portfolios in the Cabinet.
Come September and Pakistan's Electoral College, comprising both houses of the parliament and the four provincial assemblies, elected Zardari as the new president with an unprecedented majority. He bagged 480 electoral votes against 153 by Justice Saeeduzaman Siddiqui, who symbolised the dissent of the erstwhile coalition partners, PML-N, and a mere 44 by Mushahid Hussain Sayed entrusted by Pakistan Muslim League (Quaid), better known as the King's Party of the Musharraf era, with the rather quixotic task of using the presidential election to help the party recover from the great debacle of the general election of February 2008. Zardari has journeyed from prisons to presidency; he is the exile come home to claim a kingdom.
Some positive and negative dimensions of the process that has brought him to power are easily identifiable. In the electoral sense, Zardari faced no serious contender.
Outstanding feature
Another outstanding feature of the election was the near unanimous support that he got from the legislators from the three smaller provinces of Pakistan raising the hope that he would be the right person to heal the fractured unity of the federation. Apart from the violence related to Musharraf's uni-dimensional strategy in the war on terrorism, restoration of inter-provincial harmony ranks high on the national agenda
Zardari has limited time in which to brace himself for other equally daunting missions. The dissolution of the coalition with Nawaz Sharif led to a seriously split vote in the Punjab assembly. Here the two major parties reaffirmed their respective strength signalling a renewed contest for the loyalty of the people. This polarisation need not, however, regress into the futile political conflict of 1990s that paved the way for military intervention and the door is still open for cooperation on issues that impinge on national integrity and security. The PML-N led Punjab has to figure prominently in any comprehensive salvage plan, be it in the domain of constitutional reforms, violence by extremist groups out to destabilise the state, structural reconstruction of the economy or the overdue review of foreign and security policy.
Zardari will also have to be the main interlocutor with Washington. Pakistan is not managing the relationship with the US well. The increasing attacks by US-Nato forces across the border from Afghanistan have caused considerable civilian casualties. As parliament joins the popular demand for more resolute action to stop these incursions, the government faces an ever deepening dilemma.
As the compulsions of an election year make Washington unduly insensitive to the fall-out of military strikes for Islamabad, the people see that it is the Arab states and China that are visibly trying to bail Pakistan out of the current predicament.
Zardari will have to address a plethora of difficult issues in a stressed environment, but he has the popular mandate as well as a government free of internal tensions and contradictions. He will have to rise to the enormity of challenges in the midst of which - or because of which - he has come to power with such a decisive majority.
Tanvir Ahmad Khan is a former ambassador and foreign secretary of Pakistan who currently heads the Institute of Strategic Studies, Islamabad.
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