Within a year of his inauguration, popularly elected President Mohammad Morsi found himself facing street protests of Tamarod—an aggressive group of ‘liberals’ alleged to have been trained in urban uprising by intelligence agencies. The military stepped in last month and assumed all powers. The international community refused to call it what it was: A coup d’état for all intents and purposes. Egyptian democracy is in an indeterminate state; masses are seized with suspense; and an instable stability has returned to the most volatile country of the Arab world. [break]
The bien pensant in Cairo is satisfied at the turn of events. Old Mubarak is out of prison and comfortably sequestered in a military hospital. Morsi has been put behind bars. Massacre of supporters and sympathizers of Muslim Brotherhood has raised the morale of secularist liberals. The White Shirts are ecstatic that the more things have changed the more they have remained the same and the status quo is finally secure in the reliable hands of the army. Elections have been promised within a year, but even a week is a long time in politics. Meanwhile, the army has a convenient ‘internal enemy’ that it can count upon to legitimize its regime: The Muslim Brotherhood.
Dysfunctional systems
Trajectories of history are never alike, but countries with similar pasts are often accursed to endure comparable challenges. During the Cold War era, competing camps propped up puppet regimes in client countries to promote their interests. Soviets relied upon populist parties with mass appeal. They fell one after another along with the collapse of the parent party in the Soviet Union. The US strategists had taken a different tack and put their trust in the remnants of ancien regime in emerging countries. The fallen aristocrats, the army brass, and the ambitious individuals of the middleclass—in short, the White Shirts—formed the support base of friendly dictators of Western powers in poor countries.
Starting with Major General Iskander Mirja who dismissed the Constituent Assembly, Pakistan had to endure a string of military dictators including Ayub Khan, Yayha Khan, Zi-ul-Haq and Pervez Musharraf under US aegis. Mubarak ruled Egypt with an iron hand, and managed elections, for three decades. General Augusto Pinochet lorded over Chile. The list of despots propped up by the Pentagon is long. The monarchy in Nepal was entrusted with the task of maintaining the country as a safe haven for Western interests in South Asia.
Totalitarian regimes produce followers of the official faith of the state. Dissenters are either eliminated or exiled. That could be the reason a totalitarian regime totters and falls as soon as it does not have the strong personality of a pope-cum-tsar at the helms. Authoritarian regimes adapt with changes in ground realities by a process of continuous cooptation. Such systems generate a delusion of openness among the middleclass, which begins to crave opportunities for personal advancement that even oppositional politics can throw up from time to time.
On the flip side, a culture of conformity emerges in authoritarian societies where dissent is ironically dismissed as opportunism and negativity becomes the norm. With hope being in short supply, the civil society then begins to hanker for saviors. The yearning for a Gandhi (charged for ‘treason’ by the British), a Mandela (once prosecuted as a ‘terrorist’ by the apartheid regime) or even a Jang Bahadur (a cunning usurper that helped crush Indian Uprising to gain imperial approval) forges a mindset that disdains convolutions of democracy and craves for certainties of an authoritarian order.
In addition to mindless hero-worship, vacuous nationalism, and senseless demonizing of the ‘other’, excessive obsession with ‘internal threat’ is yet another feature of societies that have endured authoritarian regimes. Totalitarian regimes are totally dependent upon the apparatus of coercion. Under authoritarian regimes, a combination of propaganda and coercion is adopted to produce and maintain a docile populace. Mubarak was portrayed as a modernizer. Musharraf modeled himself after Mustafa Kemal Ataturk of Turkey, and Mahendra had the qualifier of democracy tagged to his Panchayat rule. An ‘internal threat’ is immediate enough to cause panic but sufficiently vague to let authorities assure the masses that the situation is under their control.
The defining characteristic of authoritarian society is that almost everyone has lost faith in the purity of processes. It is always the results that matter. Brilliance of the few is the flip side of rampant mediocrity in a society where exceptional performers are put on pedestals and pulled down equally quickly to be replaced with fresher idols. Probably that is the reason regular elections are necessary to prevent violent upheavals.
Ritualistic aversion
More than the purpose, the very exercise of national election is a celebration of democracy. For now, it is immaterial whether a newly elected Constituent Assembly would be able to formulate the supreme law of the land or not; its mere formation would reestablish the supremacy of the people. But that’s not what Messrs Mohan Baidya and his Maoist Company has been told to believe.
All elections between the royal-military coup of 1960 and the plebiscite in 1980 were managed affairs that sought to provide popular legitimacy to whoever had received the blessings of the royal palace. When the Graduate Constituency (the royal advisory council called Rashtriya Panchayat in 1960s and ’70s had seats reserved for representatives elected by university graduates!) threw up unpalatable winners such as Ramraja Prasad Singh, they were either made to accept offers they couldn’t refuse or disappear from the scene altogether.
Though the results came to be intensely contested, even BP Koirala had accepted the outcome of National Referendum because contending parties followed the process of the plebiscite in good faith. Instead of establishing the supremacy and sanctity of popular elections, the Referendum ultimately ended up violating the faith of the people in the ballot box.
It’s not just hardcore Maoists that detest elections; those that participate in the process also do so with a sense of resignation rather than confidence in the judgment of voters. The Tamrod in Egypt was angry that the electorate had chosen to go with the Muslim Brotherhood. The West has not yet forgiven Palestinians for believing Hamas. The Yellow Shirts of Bangkok are still cross with Thai voters because the people preferred ‘populist’ Shinawatras to paternalists of the business-military lobby. The White Shirts of Nepal are hesitant that elections under the circumstances would lead to a fractured house dominated by the Pushpa Kamal Dahal and his acolytes.
Merit—the quality of worthiness—is a contested concept because those in power mostly get to set its criteria. Elections do not produce a meritocracy; mediocrity is often inseparable from mass politics. That is the reason elected regimes invariably fail to do great harm. The new CA will not do miracles. However, its mere formation in an authoritarian society would check ambitions of militarists and become a miraculous act by itself.
That is the reason ambitious individuals of all persuasions—red communists, yellow monarchists, blue liberals and white libertarians—would do everything under their control to foil elections.
The destiny of post-2008 politicos—Maoists, Madheshis, Janjatis, Dalits and women rights activists—hangs by a thin thread and can fall with a crash if elections are not held in November. No, the sky would not fall; but it would be propped up with pillars of the past all over again.
Related story
No quick fix for struggling South Africa Test team - Du Plessis
