All right, General Sahib, we capitulate: we admit that contrary to our initial reservations, you're a right regular guy. Along with the rest of the known world, we concede that you have made your point. Under your regime, the press shall be free, the economy shall boom, accountability shall be entered into the lexicon, your will shall even be ratified by a referendum, and executed thereafter in a fine balance of the military and the civil. In a single allusion, the lion shall lie down with the lamb. What use it invents for the poor thing thereafter, of course, remains to be seen, and there are sundry precedents from elsewhere in the world which bode ill for the more civil party in such an arrangement. It is at the mention of the referendum, in fact, that disbelief ceases to be suspended. Even General Musharraf himself was forced to admit at his press conference, in the time-honoured tradition of the junior school essay, that the proposal had some good points and some bad points.This will be no referendumat all for two excellent reasons. First, it will take place under a military dispensation, which means that it will be more an expression of herd solidarity than an exercise of the political will of a nation. Further, such a referendum must lead to the old ethical argument against majoritarianism: the fact that an overwhelming fraction of the population supports a political move does not necessarily mean that they are propelling a nation in the right direction. A choice between ayes and nays is no choice at all, except when the issue at hand is very narrowly defined. Real decisions in the real world are always multiple-choice tests.General Musharraf also invites suspicion by the terms with which he is defining his tenure. The end-point of his regime will be determined "objectively", not temporally. The world has learned to be wary of such fixity of purpose before, especially when it proceeds from within a dress uniform. Apart from the fact that Musharraf has expressed a certain weakness for Kemal Ataturkand reform within Islam, his motivations are not too far removed from those of Muammar Gaddafi, who came to power with the intention of asserting Libya's independence from foreign forces and ensuring that it got a good economic deal for its oil. Musharraf, similarly, has put the economy first on his agenda. It would be silly to extend the argument and suggest that he will end up financing airplane bombings, but the general point remains valid: that an open-ended military dispensation has no access to the corrective forces that keep a democracy on an even keel. In modern times, no military head of state, however enlightened, has managed to serve the people well, even when backed by a civilian bureaucracy. General Musharraf may have wrested office with the best of intentions, but if he wants to leave behind a clean entry in the history books, he should reject all talk of a referendum to perpetuate his rule. He should set himself a deadline instead of the bloodless revolution he hopes to work inPakistan.The military is known for its efficiency, after all. Or is it already going soft in civvy street?
