Democracy from 1990 to 1996

By Prof Dr. Sohail Ansari

NAWAZ GOVERNMENT (1990 TO 1993)

Though Nawaz publicly vowed to follow reconciliation, not revenge, he immediately silenced Benazir when she organized a civil disobedience movement. He maintained government restrictions on public demonstration and sought to concentrate all powers in him which resulted in power struggle that doomed democracy. (1) 

BENAZIR GOVERNMENT (1993 TO 1996)

Return of Benazir to power in 1993 was seen with hope that three years in opposition must have mellowed her. No longer hobbled by the president, she was expected to deliver; it seemed almost to all that she was going to write a new and better chapter for country; and ‘most important, that ‘the country’s viceregal tradition, born in the crucible of colonialism had at long last been laid to rest.’(2)

Benazir proved every one wrong by reverting to the more familiar Benazir of her initial tenure. The country’s economic and social plight was ignored in the struggle to retain power, and a classic example of intrigue, influence peddling, and an outright bribery ripped apart the country. ‘Democracy proved to be another empty concept as the government’s draconian measures sought to neutralize the voices of dissent. Nor could the arbitrariness of the government’s actions be justified on anything but personal grounds; the Bhuttos were engaged in a vendetta and the whole country was witness to the unleashing of nightmarish forces….intimidation and arbitrary arrest had become commonplace by the beginning of the third year of the Benazir Bhutto administration’(3) Ayaz Amir writing in Dawn on 7 October cited the discredited government of Benazir, asserting that ‘it was the ‘brazenness’ of the men and women ‘running the latter-day Mughal court which passes for a government of Pakistan that would have discredited a nunnery or a college of cardinals’ the writer asserted that there was not a ‘sliver of independent thinking in all the glittering array of Ms.Bhutto’s court’. And finally coming to the climax of his piece, Amir noted that the struggle had always focused on power, not the welfare of the people of Pakistan: Bhutto vs. Zia, Zia vs. Junejo, Ghulam Ishaq vs. Benazir, Ghulum Ishaq vs. Nawaz, and now Faoorq Legahri vs. Benazir, none of these ‘mighty battle’ had any relevance for the common Pakistani citizens. Nor did Ayaz Amir believed that the current National Assembly was capable of moving beyond the oratorical dimensions of the corruption issue, and he lamented Benazir’s inability to reverse course, to admit her mistakes, to clean house, and to move forthrightly to tackle the nation’s pressing business. Noting that even the Ayub and Zia government had some notion of the rules of the game, Amin charged the Benazir administration with the flouting of all established understanding, of riding ‘roughshod’ over all the conventions that had sustained Pakistani society through so many turbulent years.

1              Wriggins, ‘Pakistan in transition’, Chicago, Sage, 1999, P58

2.            Vorys, ‘Political development in Pakistan, Princeton., NJ Press, 2000, 560

3.            Abbot, ‘Pakistan and democracy’ Chicago, Aldine, 1999, 198