Dynasty Tainting Pakistan Democracy, Bhutto Foes Charge

The shouting started in Pakistan’s modern National Assembly hall the moment the Islamic priest finished chanting the prayer that opened the evening session.

The subject at issue: democracy and dynasty under Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

“How can you call this a democracy?” cried an opposition member, Chaudhry Shujaat, as his colleagues thumped their desks in approval. “You are violating traditions which are observed by democratic nations throughout the world. There can be no democracy without checks on government power.”

Members of the newly reconstituted National Assembly were incensed by the prime minister’s appointment of her father-in-law, Hakim Ali Zardari, as chairman of the legislative committee that serves as watch-dog over government spending.

“In a democracy, it is the right of the opposition to head the Public Accounts Committee,” Shujaat said. “The government’s expenditures must be checked.”

As the presiding officer shouted for order, Bhutto’s parliamentary minister, Tariq Rahim, said: “Rules are rules. Traditions are traditions. And in this country, the tradition of the previous government was that the chairman of this committee was from the government.”

True, Bhutto’s critics responded, but the previous government was a dictatorship. And worse, they said, Bhutto appointed her mother, Nusrat Bhutto, to a Cabinet post equivalent to deputy prime minister.

All this has raised charges that the Bhuttos, who had been out of power since Benazir’s father, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was executed after a military coup in 1977, are trying to build a political dynasty.

One opposition member, Umar Hayat Lalika, wryly suggested from the assembly floor recently that the prime minister might want to appoint her infant son, Bilawal, “minister of children’s affairs.”

Bhutto’s defenders, still in the majority five months after her dramatic election victory, say there is no difference between what Bhutto is doing and what President John F. Kennedy did. Kennedy named his brother, Robert, attorney general and helped chart the career of their brother, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.).

“This government remains firmly committed to democracy and its traditions,” Rahim declared.

Supporters of Bhutto, 35, point to the fact that the opposition can air its complaints openly on the legislative floor as proof that democracy is alive and well in Pakistan.

“There is a rebirth of democracy in Pakistan, but it remains in its infancy,” said Jane Ann Lindley, an American consultant to Pakistan’s National Assembly, who has spent 2 1/2 years in Islamabad helping the government rebuild its legislative institutions. “The infant has been born, but it has to go through the stage of a toddler before it gets on its own two feet and functions.”

Western diplomats and independent Pakistani analysts are not so sure. They see growing signs of corruption and patronage, and they complain that Bhutto’s government has been so obsessed with political gamesmanship that it has failed to govern.

“The big problem everyone is talking about is corruption and patronage,” said Omar Asghar Khan, a Pakistani economic consultant. “People are talking about Benazir’s husband, Asif Zardari, about land speculation, about government contracts, about the appointment of senior party people to key posts, and about the going price of a government job. The rumor is that for 300,000 rupees (about $15,000), you can get a post in the new government. People are getting more and more uneasy.”

And a Western diplomat commented: “Thoughtful Pakistanis are beginning to wonder about the presence of a lot of people Benazir brought back from her father’s time. There is a lot of talk about dynasty-building and a return to the political gamesmanship from the time of Benazir’s father.”

The conflict between Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party and its principal opposition, the Islamic Democratic Alliance, came to a head late last month.

Bhutto party workers in the opposition-held province of Punjab, the wealthiest of Pakistan’s four provinces, had been trying to get the provincial legislature to unseat the opposition alliance headed by Mian Nawaz Sharif, a 35-year-old millionaire businessman, with a vote of no confidence.

But the strategy backfired when Sharif won a resounding victory. The incident was seen as a serious political misstep by Bhutto.

“It seems to many thoughtful Pakistanis that this political battle has preoccupied Benazir’s government to the point where her government has failed to govern and the legislature has failed to legislate,” the diplomat said.

Lindley, who has spent 22 years with the Library of Congress and is a consultant to nine other Asian parliamentary governments, regards the criticism as premature and unfair, as do many Pakistanis.

“When a country has had a fairly repressive regime for such a long time, there is a lot of pent-up emotion,” said Lindley, who came to Pakistan to oversee the building of a new library for the National Assembly but whose mission expanded to include helping rebuild the institution itself. “There is a lot of naivete among the politicians, because they haven’t been able to practice politics. And there needs to be a lot of talking and letting off of steam and having this free flow of discussion before the institution actually takes shape.”

For Lindley and others, the 11 years of dictatorship under President Zia ul-Haq, who was killed in a mysterious air crash last August, is the key to understanding the first few months of Bhutto’s rule.

“Given that they’ve had 11 years of unrepresentative government,” Lindley said, “the first obligation of the new legislators is to give vent to the people’s hostility and points of view. It’ll take five or six months just to hear what the people have to say. If you’ve had 11 years of unrepresentative government, what is 100 days? To me, that’s not enough.”

But for political analysts, the debate over patronage and alleged dynasty building is critical to measuring the growth of democracy under Pakistan’s youngest-ever prime minister.

“When the winner takes all, democracy ceases to function, and the parliamentary minorities are the key to preventing this,” said Ijaz Gilani, director of Gallup Pakistan, referring to the debate over appointment of Bhutto’s father-in-law to the accounting post.

“Democracy is a system that is designed, not as the rule of the majority, but as one that will protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority,” said Gilani, a professional pollster trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “And unless you bring the opposition members into the mainstream, democracy is unlikely to last for very long.”