A PRIME MINISTERIAL EXECUTIVE
While a primary impulse of representative governments has been to invest executive powers in the office of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, the extent to which the Prime Minister’s office has accrued far greater powers in the mode of personalised rule tests the claims for democracy that might be made.
Such tendencies were exemplified by Zulfiqar Bhutto in the years 1971—1977. The Interim Constitution that his government pushed through the legislature in 1972 installed him in the office of President, an office that was ‘more powerful than even the President in the US Constitution’.[277]In the formulation of the 1973 Constitution, democratic consensus militated for a turn to parliamentary democracy. By the time that Bhutto was displaced from power he had refashioned the office of the Prime Minister so that it embodied the unitariness of power that he had professed an original preference for. He used the malleability of parliamentary convention to retain powers away from and at the expense of his own appointed Ministers.
A fUrther means of enacting unitary power that had been retained in the new Constitution was the power of promulgating Ordinances. Altogether, over 200 ordinances were enacted in the years 1972—1977. With the aid of a President duly willing to act on his advice, the need for building political consensus, for conferring with Parliament or even ministers in the making of law was circumvented by Bhutto. In fact, Parliament itself was deeply neglected and Bhutto and his Cabinet ministers were said to be rarely in attendance. Additionally, Bhutto engineered a Seventh Amendment Act, inserting a new Article 96A into the Constitution, which allowed the Prime Minister to advise the President to call for a popular referendum to express confidence in the office of the Prime Minister.[278] Although there was no formal clash with the provision laying out the procedure for a parliamentary vote of confidence, it can only be surmised that Bhutto sought, through this, to establish a parallel forum to justify his continuing hold on office as opposition parties aligned in establishing the PNA.[279]
The heavy-handedness with which Bhutto employed executive powers also impelled various reforms to the structure of the bureaucratic- military complex.
Towards the army, Bhutto engineered policies of both reform and appeasement. This dualism stemmed from a reliance upon the army to quell labour agitation, regional conflict and, in the final instance, in 1977 in the short-sighted way that Article 245 was invoked to insulate Bhutto against street protest. In contrast he perceived that the self-confidence or arrogance of the bureaucracy needed to be broken if his populist redistributionary policies were to be realised.[280] The intention to reform it was expressed first and foremost by the omission of constitutional protection, in contrast to both prior constitutions, for appointment, promotion rank, and so forth, for members of the services.[281]The reforms of army and bureaucracy were neither unwelcome nor unauthorised within the powers granted to the Prime Minister. However, in combination with the multiple constitutional amendments oriented to altering the terms of service for the judiciary, these acts by Bhutto reinforced a perception that he was enacting personalised rule. Further, the retention of emergency powers under Article 232 for most of his time in power similarly lent credence to apprehensions of his authoritarianism. Notoriously, he also established a secret police service that was responsible only to him, as Prime Minister. While its ambit of operations was limited, its creation was deeply resented amongst the conventional armed forces.
The consolidations of power that Bhutto engineered as Prime Minister and Chief Executive were insufficient nonetheless to keep him installed in office. When his daughter assumed the position of Prime Minster 11 years after his execution, the rules had changed considerably. In Benazir Bhutto’s first term in office, she had to take virtual dictation from the army high command about several appointments to her Cabinet as amongst the many conditions imposed for being asked to form the government, even when her party had won the greatest number of seats in the 1988 election. Other clear conditions, those which have thereafter marked a red line of danger when civilian politicians cross at their own peril, were to neither meddle in the promotions of the army nor with matters of foreign affairs and defence.[282]
When the PML-N and Nawaz Sharif won a two-thirds majority in Parliament in 1996, the government ensured the removal of Article 58(2)(b) through the Thirteenth Amendment Act.
Sharif also made haste on additional measures and Acts to insulate itself and this included passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, in 1997[283] which barred floor-crossing. While the Amendment came to be at issue in much of the breakdown of relations between Sharif and the Supreme Court and then between Sharif and President Leghari,[284] it was upheld against a challenge at the Supreme Court.[285]Sharif also shrouded his drive towards further executive and legislative powers within the office of the Prime Minister under the rubric of furthering the Islamisation of the legal system.[286] The Fifteenth Amendment proposed only a few changes to the existing Constitution but these proposals aroused great anxiety about Sharif’s dictatorial aspirations. To speed up Islamisation, the executive was being empowered to issue directives, which had no other constitutional authorisation. Furthermore, the constitutional amendment formula was to be made more lenient for measures oriented to Islamisation. Just as Zia had renamed the National Assembly Majlis-I-Shoora to signify that it was a body for consultation, so it seemed that Sharif was aiming for a similar demotion of parliamentary institutions. The Fifteenth Amendment was passed by the lower house and was in the Senate when Musharraf’s November 1999 coup disturbed this advance.[287]
Backed by a two-thirds majority in Parliament, Sharif had built up a mistaken notion of immovability from power, given this historic mandate. Additionally, in a hawkish public environment, he had also gained some public stature for having undertaken the step of testing to establish Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities. Several missteps would, however, place him on the other side of the red line that marked danger for civilian rulers in Pakistan. In October 1998, the army high command had initiated a military operation to regain the Kargil Valley from Indian occupation. Vast casualties ensued on both sides as, counter to Pakistani calculations, the Indian army and public was willing to put up a significant fight.
By all reliable accounts, Sharif had been kept in the dark through the planning and original invasion, posing the distinct quandary that, ‘An army chief acting unilaterally poses serious questions of legality, while the Prime Minister’s complicity in the Kargil episode raises concerns about his credibility, months after the two nuclear rivals had signed an agreement in February 1999’.[288] Under significant international, particularly American, pressure Sharif agreed to a unilateral withdrawal while maintaining that the invasion was not in fact undertaken by army regulars. The terms and timing of the withdrawal enraged the army high command. Later in the same year, Sharif sought to displace General Musharraf as Chief of Army Staff while the latter was on a trip to Sri Lanka. This became the pretext for the staging of Musharraf’s coup, Sharif’s trial for hijacking and an eventual negotiated plea bargain that allowed Sharif to retreat, in exile to Saudi Arabia.[289]With Nawaz Sharif as Prime Minister of a majority government since 2013, there has been a perceptible centralisation of powers once again, but not with the aid of Constitutional Amendments. With a hand-picked President, a majority PML-N Assembly at the centre, as well as a PML-N government with his brother as Chief Minister in Punjab, the only effective threats to this power has been exercised indirectly by the military.[290]
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