An interesting article. At the end of the day, as one travels/works more and more across South Asia and gets to know the young and the established opinion-makers, business elite, cultural mavens, civil society members and the like . . . and sees the rates of progress (or lack thereof) made by these various countries, it becomes clear (at least to me!) that virulent patriotism notwithstanding, we in Nepal are NOT so different from the Pakistanis, the Indians, the Bangladeshis and the Sri Lankans. How they run or not run their institutions is similar to how we run or not ours. oohi ashu ******************** Where liberals love a dictator Pakistan's experience of democracy as a kind of elective feudalism is a reminder that the ballot box by itself is no panacea -http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1485461,00.html William Dalrymple Tuesday May 17, 2005 The Guardian If it has achieved little else, George Bush's "war on terror" has at least succeeded in mating some unlikely bedfellows. Who, a few years ago, could imagine the strange coupling of the Labour party and the neocons? Or the love-in between the House of Bush and the House of Saud? An equally bizarre alliance is now to be found in Pakistan. The liberal elite, somewhat to its astonishment, has suddenly found a new affection for the military dictator, General Pervez Musharraf. Travel through the country today, talk to the journalists and opinion-makers, and you will find surprisingly little enthusiasm for the resumption of full democracy, which - under US pressure - looks likely to take place in 2007. It is not that Pakistan's liberals approve of military dictatorships. These were the people who took to the streets to resist General Zia ul-Haq. But the democratic politics of Pakistan throughout the 1990s proved so violent, so corrupt and so socially and economically disastrous that Musharraf's rule is now widely regarded as the least awful option. Pakistan provides a depressing, but highly significant, example of just how flawed a democracy can be in a developing country - and a useful reality check at a time when Bush and Tony Blair seem to have persuaded themselves that democracy is a magic wand that can provide an instant solution to all the ills of the Islamic world. Certainly, few middle-class Pakistanis have much relish for the return of Benazir Bhutto or Nawaz Sharif, the leaders who took Pakistan to the brink of collapse in the 90s. There are good reasons for this. Ten years ago, at the height of Bhutto's rule, the corruption monitoring organisation Transparency International named Pakistan as the second most corrupt country in the world. At the same time, Amnesty International accused the government of massive human rights abuse, with one of the world's worst records of custodial deaths, extrajudicial killings and torture. Moreover, Bhutto and her husband were charged with plundering the country to buy European estates and townhouses. It was difficult to imagine Bhutto's successor, Nawaz Sharif, making a bigger hash of things, but he quickly succeeded, harassing his political opponents, dismissing judges and threatening journalists. The Friday Times editor, Najam Sethi, was abducted from his home on Sharif's orders; the police denied all knowledge of his arrest until a series of demonstrations eventually forced them to release him. Such was the harassment suffered by the leading newspaper, Jang, that it was able to produce editions only one page long. Sharif and his brother bussed in hundreds of thugs to ransack the supreme court. Soon afterwards the chief justice was forced to resign under a barrage of threats. Sharif also moved Pakistan closer to Islamist policies, entrenching sharia in the legal system. Meanwhile, Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency presided over the growth of jihadi groups, believing them to be the most cost-effective way of tying down the Indian army in Kashmir and exerting Pakistani influence in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the economy teetered towards collapse. Behind this succession of crises lay the bigger problem of a fundamentally flawed political system where land-owning remains the only social base from which politicians can emerge. The educated middle class - which in India seized control in 1947 - is in Pakistan still largely excluded from the political process. As a result, in many of the more backward parts of Pakistan the local feudal zamindar can expect his people to vote for his chosen candidate. Politicians tend to come to power more through deals done within Pakistan's small feudal-army elite than through the will of the people. In contrast, Musharraf's record in bringing the country back from the brink has been impressive. Under the urbane eye of Shaukat Aziz, formerly the vice-president of Citibank and now Musharraf's prime minister, Pakistan is enjoying a construction and consumer boom, with growth approaching 7% - although some of this has been generated by the mass repatriation of Pakistani drug fortunes after the tightening of money-laundering regulations in the US and the Gulf. Sectarian violence is down, the jihadis have been restrained and the ISI, which encouraged them, has been partially reformed. Press criticism has been tolerated and the airwaves freed up. It has certainly not been an unblemished record. Musharraf has made many unwise compromises with the Muslim ulema, and in two provinces has entered into an alliance with the hardline Islamist MMM. Musharraf has failed even to attempt sorting out the country's disastrously inadequate education and health system; instead the army is spending money on a fleet of American F-16s. The Pakistani human rights record remains abysmal. But few can really dispute that Musharraf's rule has brought Pakistan better economic governance and a greater degree of stability and press freedom than it has enjoyed for many years. The wider lesson to be drawn from this is that while US support for democracy is preferable to its previous policy of bolstering client autocracies, electoral democracy is not on its own an automatic panacea. As Pakistan shows, rigged, corrupt, unrepresentative and flawed democracies without the strong independent institutions of a civil society - a free press, an independent judiciary, an empowered election commission - can foster governments that are every bit as tyrannical as any dictatorship. Justice and democracy are not necessarily synonymous. In Pakistan, democracy has meant a kind of elective feudalism. In Lebanon, the eccentric electoral system, rigged in the Maronites' favour, has made it impossible for the majority Shia community to achieve power. In Iraq, the electoral system fails to reflect the popular mandate, and the means by which it was imposed - down the barrel of an American gun - has led many of the Sunni community to disfranchise themselves. It is a similar situation in Afghanistan, where the elected government of President Hamid Karzai has as bad a record of torture and custodial deaths as any of its predecessors (although much of the worst torture is taking place in US bases, outside Afghan sovereignty). As Dr Sima Samar, the leading human rights activist in Afghanistan, put it in the New York Review of Books, "democracy and freedom are simply meaningless without justice and the rule of law". ? William Dalrymple is the author of White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in 18th-Century India www.williamdalrymple.com