From: shafqat@neuro.duke.edu (Saad Shafqat)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.pakistan
Subject: Pakistan & the myth of democracy.
Date: 23 Nov 92 00:59:17 GMT
Distribution: usa
Organization: Duke University; Durham, N.C.




It is that time in Pakistan again - Time To Bring Down The Government.
The current ruling clique has been in power too long and a pubescent
hormonal rush has started to hearken the Opposition.  Benazir Bhutto
has declared that the country needs change and she has set out to 
bring it about.  I think this latest antic has convincingly
demonstrated that Ms. Bhutto is still quite clueless.  There is
no merit to her case. The time to change the government will come in 1995, 
but this point has obviously escaped her and she wants a change right away.    
There are only two conceivable reasons for this:

a) She doesn't want the current administration to last any longer
   than her own, which was dissolved by presidential decree after
   20 months.

b) She thinks the country is fast deteriorating and she can do better
   at slowing or reversing that trend.


The first is too petty and immature a motive; it sacrifices the national
interest merely to pacify a woman's rage at ego injury.  Whether her
administration's dismissal was justified or not, if her motive is simply
to avenge that insult, it remains too petty, too small.

Lets assume Ms. Bhutto is not a petty, vengeful or mean-spirited
person.  In that case, she must seriously think she can do better
than the current administration at controlling the hemorrhaging of
Pakistan.  If she really does think that, though, it is laughable.
The overwhelming need is to get the economy industrialized.  She
has no agenda for that, no insight.  The roots of her economic
education are socialist: she was trained by a man who nationalized
efficient manufacturing operations and delayed the arrival of
prosperity in Pakistan indefinitely.  There is no place in Pakistan
for a left-of-center economic agenda and Ms. Bhutto has never
endorsed anything otherwise.  If she came to power and tried to
undo the current wave of privatization of sick industrial units,
the result will be unqualified disaster.  Until Benazir Bhutto 
unequivocally denounces the nationalization policies of her
mentor, the late Zulfiqar Ali, she must be kept out of power at
all costs.

The tragedy, ultimately, is this half-baked view in Pakistan of
seeing democracy as a panacea and a general election as a prelude
to imminent prosperity.  It is a view very selectively borrowed
from Western thought and experience, but one that conveniently
ignores how democracy, even in the West - the wealthy West -
is only half the story.  Affluence (from manufacturing) is the
other half.  As every Third World country eagerly tasting
multi-party elections has begun to find out, the two components
are inseperable.  In fact, in the history of the world, successful
democratic institutions have never been developed in poverty 
(except perhaps in India, but the dynastic role of the Nehrus there
complicates the analysis).  Nations have only grown wealthy
under benevolent dictatorships, and this limitation is probably
a universal restriction built into the nature of the progress
and development of large societies.  Britain and Western Europe
experienced industrial revolutions under monarchies (in England,
in fact, the monarchy remained executive up until the time of
Victoria - late nineteenth century).  In the US, British and
French colonies had already made their landlords enormously
rich through agriculture based on free labour and the independence
of the colonies came only when the mother country started
taxing beyond reason.  Japan, similarly, was a wealthy world power
before it lost the War and became democratic.  

Success stories in Third World countries continue to validate
this sequence.  Singapore, Taiwan, Indonesia, South Korea,
China, Spain, Malaysia have all prospered under benevolent
dictators.  Democracy is a major civic responsibility, and a
people must mature through the self-generation of wealth and
comfort before they can be worthy of it.  The West has taught
us to elect our leaders without directing us to the
requisite sources of appropriate pretraining, namely manufacturing
and efficient industrialization.  The result is the sort of
political circus that we see in Pakistan today.  For Pakistan,
I see darkness ahead.  One can't imagine the country will ever
be blessed by a sincere and benevolent dictator (or that the
people will tolerate him/her for long even if it were).  Similarly,
one can't imagine how our experiment with democracy will lead
us to maturity if the contest remains as mean-spirited as
it evidently is - to the detriment of our future, and to the 
erosion of the promises of what might have been.



Saad Shafqat.


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Newsgroups: soc.culture.pakistan