EDITORIAL: Dispensing with poor Mr Jamali

Someone is giving General Pervez Musharraf bad advice. Yesterday, even as Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali’s words that ‘I’m going nowhere’ were reverberating, news came in that he had been nudged to resign. This newspaper had already reported in its June 26 issue that Mr Jamali would resign the same day. But we are not happy to be proved right because we have consistently opposed this move for many reasons. But now that this has happened, let us see why it happened and what may lie in store for General Musharraf’s ‘democracy’.

Mr Jamali’s sacking will certainly breed uncertainty and may even lead to instability. We shall have an interim prime minister in Chaudhry Shujaat and then General Musharraf will move heaven and earth to get Shaukat Aziz elected from a ‘safe’ National Assembly seat so that he can become prime minister and dance to General Musharraf’s tune. Meanwhile, the opposition will join hands to thwart this move and allegations of ‘rigging’ will rent the air and boycotts will follow in the assembly. In the end we shall have not one (General Musharraf) but two ‘leaders’ who will have been thrust on the nation by reason of the brute force that General Musharraf enjoys because Mr Aziz will be even more of a party ‘loner’ than Mr Jamali ever was.

We hear that General Musharraf was unhappy with Mr Jamali’s inability to deliver and reduce the level of political opposition to him. If this is true then we are surprised at General Musharraf’s reasoning. First, he created a system where the prime minister is less than even a figurehead; then he handpicked Mr Jamali because the latter was thought to be most pliable; now he was peeved at Mr Jamali’s seeming inability to deliver. And pray, how might Mr Aziz be better at delivering General Musharraf’s political agenda where Mr Jamali failed because General Musharraf was not prepared to give to the prime minister what is due him in a parliamentary system?

Take a look at a whole range of issues from the negotiations on the Legal Framework Order to the peace process with India. Did anyone see Mr Jamali’s imprimatur on anything? He was there simply to do as the ‘boss’ wished and he did this admirably. Then how can his ‘performance’ or the ‘lack of it’ be used to indict him?

But there may be another perspective to this whole affair. General Musharraf seems disinclined to honour his legal and constitutional commitment to shed his uniform by December this year. That is clear by now even though he has tried to be circuitous on the issue every time the question has been put to him. It seems that he thinks, or has been made to think, that this would require a re-booting of the system. Seen from this perspective, Mr Jamali’s sacking should merely be the first step towards ‘other’ measures that might follow.

The foremost opposition to General Musharraf on the issue of the uniform will come from the Mutahidda Majlis-e-Amal with whom he made the commitment as part of the deal on the LFO. Now, while General Musharraf has made it clear that he does not think he is beholden to the MMA because the alliance has not kept its end of the bargain by opposing the NSC, the fact is that General Musharraf’s commitment is now legal and he cannot simply shrug it off without precipitating a constitutional crisis. The MMA has already refused to participate in the proceedings of the NSC and the only way, going by this logic, would be to decapitate its government in the NWFP and, by extension, the alliance itself. The move itself would entail sacking the NWFP government, ordering re-elections in that province and ensuring that the MMA does not win by playing on the internal fissures of the alliance and rigging the rest.

But the question is: Since much of this is to be done by General Musharraf himself, why get rid of Mr Jamali? The only answer that makes sense is that Mr Jamali was not 100 percent with General Musharraf on the schemes that the latter might want to hatch, from the NSC to the issue of the uniform. General Musharraf likes to clear the decks before the battle and it would make sense from his point of view to pack off anyone who was not fully with him.

But does all this add up to something? For a start it shows how General Musharraf’s much-flaunted system is both arbitrary and frail. He has been in the driver’s seat for over five years now. He has exercised unfettered powers to do as he wished. He has tempered with the system as he pleased. He had all the time in the world to tailor-make it for himself, which is exactly what he has done. In doing this he has put down political opposition and shown complete disregard for legal-normative criteria. But to what end, we may ask?

The system remains riven with inconsistencies and contradictions. The irony is that no matter how much more General Musharraf may try to make it work, it won’t. Why? Because no political system can be made to work without allowing the real and natural political actors to play their role unhampered. The desire to oversee the conduct of the politicians and monitor and corral the political parties simply does not work.

In the event, we cannot help but suspect that there may be a larger and longer-term agenda at stake. Is Mr Shaukat Aziz going to be groomed as General Pervez Musharraf’s ‘running mate’ in a new round of select provincial or general elections next year in which the Muslim League under General Musharraf’s helmsmanship is going to try and whip up a two-thirds majority in parliament to amend the constitution radically and manufacture a hybrid presidential system that fits General Musharraf like a glove? Two clichés come to mind: there’s many a slip between the cup and the lip; and the road to hell is paved with the best of intentions.