[Only one prime minister has left office in a democratic transition, in 2013. The rest have been removed by “judges, generals, bureaucrats or assassins,” Husain Haqqani, the former Pakistani ambassador to Washington, wrote on Twitter, calling it Pakistan’s “70-year tradition.”]
By Max Fisher and Amanda Taub
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Prime
Minister Nawaz Sharif speaking at a news conference in June. He stepped down
on Friday
after being ordered out by the country’s Supreme Court over corruption
charges
related to the Panama Papers. Credit B.K. Bangash/Associated Press
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Pakistan’s latest ouster of an elected leader
looks, at least on the surface, refreshingly democratic.
Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister, was ordered
out by the Supreme Court rather than the military, which had cut short his two
previous terms. He was removed over corruption charges that are backed up by
substantial evidence. Accountability and checks and balances seemed to carry
the day.
But where some see democracy’s triumph,
others see its corruption into just another tool for the powerful to subvert
public will and the rule of law.
The court avoided other officials implicated
in the scandal, deepening suspicion that its singling out of Mr. Sharif was
opportunistic. The vastly powerful military, whether by luck or design, once
again stood to benefit as its rival lost power. Normally, timid watchdogs acted
under enormous pressure from Mr. Sharif’s rivals.
The episode is a lesson in how countries like
Pakistan — with weak elected institutions and histories of repeated backsliding
and breaks in civilian control — can get stuck in a gray zone between
dictatorship and democracy.
In such a system, even steps like Mr.
Sharif’s removal, which nominally reinforce accountability and the rule of law,
can deepen decidedly undemocratic norms.
Though justice prevailed, so did perceptions
that it is applied selectively. Though corruption was punished, so was, in the
eyes of many of Mr. Sharif’s supporters, defiance of the military.
The country has shown it can lawfully remove
a prime minister, but it has also shown that voters, who have been allowed to
decide only one peaceful transfer of power, still have their leaders selected
for them. They are spectators foremost, and participants only occasionally, in
their country’s democracy.
Accountability
as a tool
Many Pakistanis quickly noticed something
that suggested Mr. Sharif’s removal might perpetuate, rather than end, the
undemocratic norms that have plagued Pakistan for decades.
The Supreme Court has pursued Mr. Sharif but
sidestepped many of the other politicians and officials implicated in the
Panama Papers leak that set off the investigation, leading to accusations that
it was pursuing selective justice.
“Moral of the story: when with the
establishment, you will not be touched,” Asma Jahangir, a prominent human
rights lawyer, wrote on Twitter, adding, “but if you disagree your grand mom
will also be investigated.”
This common perception — that politicians
serve their own interests and that accountability is deployed according to the
whims of the elite — matters. Those expectations help entrench such behavior as
a norm, making it more likely to recur.
This problem extends beyond Mr. Sharif. Tax
evasion rates in Pakistan are notoriously high, particularly among the wealthy.
Transparency International, a corruption watchdog, ranked the country 113 out
of 176 countries in its corruption perceptions index.
Though laws against corruption are strongly
written, they are underenforced. And weak elected institutions are easily
corrupted. Together, that means that nearly any leader is vulnerable to
prosecution and removal if other institutions choose to single him or her out.
But each time they do so, they reinforce the
belief impression that true power lies with the so-called hidden hands,
powerful military and other elites who manipulate the system according to their
own wishes, not with voters.
The decision in Mr. Sharif’s case, which took
a very broad view of the constitutional clauses requiring politicians to be
“honest and reliable,” risks exacerbating perceptions that justice is often a
means to a political end.
“The clause under which he was removed
essentially means all of Pakistan is ineligible,” said Adil Najam, the dean of
Boston University’s School of Global Studies and an expert on Pakistan’s
politics.
Accountability, in such a system, can also be
a tool for targeting rivals. This weakens the expectation of punishment, which
is supposed to deter future corruption, as well as the ability of healthy
institutions to self-regulate.
Disrupting
democracy
Mr. Sharif’s removal, even if it does
discourage corruption, repeats a pattern that has recurred throughout
Pakistan’s history and has been at the core of many of its worst problems.
Unelected power centers, not voters, decide who rules.
Only one prime minister has left office in a
democratic transition, in 2013. The rest have been removed by “judges,
generals, bureaucrats or assassins,” Husain Haqqani, the former Pakistani
ambassador to Washington, wrote on Twitter, calling it Pakistan’s “70-year
tradition.”
If Mr. Sharif had finished his term and faced
elections again, that would have been a second peaceful transition, a milestone
many political scientists see as a vital step in consolidating democracy.
“You want elected officials to be judged by
the population on the basis of their record,” said Paul Staniland, a University
of Chicago political scientist who studies Pakistan.
Ideally, Mr. Staniland said, successive
elections would establish voters, not unelected bodies, as the final arbiters.
Beyond being the point of democracy, this makes leaders accountable to the
interests of their nation as a whole, rather than those of a few powerful
elites.
Democracy fully takes root only when all
aspects of the political system assume that final authority rests with voters
and elections. For Pakistan, after so many coups and assassinations, persuading
everyone of this would take time.
“These interventions disrupt that,” Mr.
Staniland said, by sending the message that elites can continue assuming that
they, not voters, still decide who rules.
Cycles
of instability
Those interventions are possible because of
an imbalance in the strength of Pakistan’s institutions. The military and
courts are powerful and highly trusted by the public. By contrast, elected
institutions, especially political parties, are weak.
The result is that instead of one institution
checking another in ways that strengthen the democratic system, those
institutions undermine one another’s already scant legitimacy, leaving the
stronger unelected bodies to intervene again and again.
Individual checks like the removal of Mr.
Sharif, however justified, chip away further at the legitimacy of those
institutions. They remain just relevant enough to jostle for power, ensuring
more such cycles, but too weak to actually clean out the system — a recipe for
instability.
With each such case, those institutions are
also on trial. In a healthier democracy, finding a politician guilty proves the
system works. In Pakistan, where elected institutions are often assumed to be
corrupt, it can mean, in the eyes of voters, indicting the system as just as
guilty.
Imran Khan, an opposition leader, has pursued
Mr. Sharif’s ouster for years, filing court petitions and leading public
protests to press watchdog groups and now the Supreme Court.
The military also opposed Mr. Sharif, in part
because he sought reconciliation with India, Pakistan’s rival. That does not
mean the military played any role in Mr. Sharif’s ouster. But it fed into
perceptions that he was outside the good graces of Pakistan’s power brokers,
leaving him vulnerable.
“I could tell myself a happy story in which
this marks the judiciary asserting the rule of law and getting everything on
the right course,” Mr. Staniland said. “But I think that’s pretty unlikely.”
A more plausible reading, he added, is that
“justice is applied inconsistently and will be used to target parties and
institutions that will then be unable to recover.”
This has led to a norm, Mr. Najam said, of
parties seeking to defeat one another not in elections but by creating the
conditions for a military or judicial coup against them.
Without a break from Pakistan’s regular
cycles of collapse, political institutions cannot grow stronger, and so cannot
provide the real accountability and democracy that voters demand.
“Pakistan has always been in this place,” Mr.
Najam said. “Every democratic government in Pakistan that has fallen, and all
of them has fallen, has fallen on the sword of supposed accountability.”
