Hybrid: thoughts on its 35th birthday

With youngsters becoming an overwhelming majority in our country, it may sometimes become important to talk about things that started to take shape before their birth. Our continuing experiment with hybrid regimes over the last 35 years is one example. And what better time to talk about it than now, barely a few months ahead of an election that appears tailor-made to produce another variant of these hybrids.

And variants there have been aplenty, over these three and a half decades. It all started with our military’s iron-clad hold over the country’s fortunes being challenged by the sudden, though not untimely, death of a dictator by the name of General Zia.

The year was 1988 and unsure if it could trust civilians to run the nation, our uniformed well-wishers came up with the original hybrid – enshrined in the 8^th Constitutional Amendment whereby an empowered presidency, backed by the army, could sack an elected government should its behaviour be found wanting.

Although more of a tango than a complete hybrid entity on its own, the system nevertheless helped us get rid of four elected governments one after another in just under 10 years till in 1997, a key portion of this amendment was removed by Mian Nawaz Sharif’s two-thirds majority government and this infamous tango had to be abandoned mid-stride.

Unfortunately, the demise of the 8^th Amendment was soon followed by another round of military rule that was to last for the next 10 years. However, during this period, the hybrid experiment wasn’t abandoned entirely but was upgraded to take the shape of a brand new party that would ensure that it never stepped out of line nor did anything that may bolster our well-meaning political engineers’ mistrust of the political class.

The PMLN was decimated through tactics not dissimilar to what we are witnessing today and a brand new party by the name of PMLQ was dissected out of it. Unfortunately, the new variant proved even more disastrous than its previous version, triggering an insurgency right in the heart of our federal capital. Clearly, the Lal Masjid insurgency, coupled with the assassination of Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto, was enough to force a rethink of the hybrid and for the next 10 years, starting 2008, politicians were allowed the facility of getting elected and forming a government on their own.

Throughout these 10 years, however, there were instances that reminded us of the perils of living without a hybrid. One prime minister had to be forced out of office because he dared to refuse moving against his own party’s chairman. Another had to be sent packing because … well … he wasn’t very likeable, or perhaps he thought too much of himself. So, clearly, the hybrid had to be revived.

It took a lot of effort though, from importing pseudo-religious leaders from Canada to help stage dharnas (sit-ins) in Islamabad to stealing an entire election. But it was done, if only to run into a strange obstacle that many had warned us of but for some reason, we were unable to heed those warnings. This third variant exhibited a deep rooted mind-body disconnect with almost surreal results. It would say one thing, but do the exact opposite. Or it would do one thing, and say the exact opposite. All attempts at mind-body synchronisation proved futile, almost as if the hybrid was under some kind of a spell that repelled all remedies.

Which brings us to where we are today, a couple of weeks before the 35^th anniversary of our hybrid experiment launched with the November 16, 1988 election. And one can’t really call it a bad place because we are now armed with a deep understanding of what works with hybrids and what can potentially go wrong.

For example, we now know that replacing one politician with another is not enough to foster trust between our political class and state institutions. We also know that military rule by itself is not a solution. And that means there is no option but to continue with our experimentation and keep improving the creature it spawns.

That is perhaps why we find ourselves headed into an election that is already promising new possibilities. Instead of having one majority party and the attendant worry of it losing its way, why can’t we have many, many parties in the parliament that come together to form a government – a hybrid with many parts instead of a few. Common sense tells us that should something go awry, it is far easier fixing a small part than overhauling the whole.

Having invested decades in this experiment, what’s another couple of years? Unless, of course, someone is finally tired of it, wants to shut down the lab and just try out pure civilian rule for a change – a government genuinely elected by the people in a free, fair and impartial election. Who knows, it may well turn out to be an idea well worth experimenting with.