Najam in NYT on Prospects for Pakistan Democracy
Dean Adil Najam of the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University was interviewed by New York Times columnists Max Fisher and Amanda Taub for their news analysis on the unfolding political situation in Pakistan after a Supreme Court verdict forced the country’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to resign.
The report, titled “Pakistan, Ousting Leader, Dashes Hopes for Fuller Democracy” (New York Times, July 29, 2017) explains how how accountability and charges of corruption have a popular pretext for removing elected leaders, in part because it is an argument whose veracity resonates with the Pakistan public. Najam is quoted as explaining this phenomenon:
The decision in Mr. Sharif’s case, which took a very broad view of the constitutional clauses requiring politicians to be “honest and reliable,” risks exacerbating perceptions that justice is often a means to a political end. “The clause under which he was removed essentially means all of Pakistan is ineligible,” said Adil Najam, the dean of Boston University’s School of Global Studies and an expert on Pakistan’s politics.
The NYT report ends with quoting Najam on the argument that the extra-electoral removals have now become a norm in Pakistan, and a very unhealthy norm:
This has led to a norm, Mr. Najam said, of parties seeking to defeat one another not in elections but by creating the conditions for a military or judicial coup against them. Without a break from Pakistan’s regular cycles of collapse, political institutions cannot grow stronger, and so cannot provide the real accountability and democracy that voters demand. “Pakistan has always been in this place,” Mr. Najam said. “Every democratic government in Pakistan that has fallen, and [every one] of them has fallen, has fallen on the sword of supposed accountability.”
Read full article here.
Adil Najam is the Inaugural Dean of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies and was a former Vice Chancellor of the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Pakistan.