No more oligarchy, please...!

This is the second time tonight you've wanted to strike me," said Pacheso. "Perhaps it is good for you. In any case, I'm not judging you. I'm describing. If I tell a patient he has cancer, that is not to judge him. You have a kind of emotional cancer.-An extract from Stephen Dobyn's novel.

At this precise moment in the history of Pakistan, the PPP body-politics needs an urgent diagnosis. And the fact is that it is suffering from what can be described as "political oligarchic disorder."

Oligarchy, as a political concept and doctrine, translated into the actual management of state affairs, means the rule of a specific group of people with the sole purpose of retaining "political power" with exclusive rights and benefits to itself. As such, quite obviously, the oligarchic model of governance is inherently contradictory to principles and conventions of democratic norms. Democracy and oligarchy cannot co-exist. Military dictatorships in Pakistan, including Musharraf's regime in the immediate past, are prime examples of the oligarchic structure of politics.

But the history of oligarchies is as old as human civilisation. Ambitious and "power hungry" rulers have always been devising mechanisms, strategies, modus operandi and formulas to systematise control over "political power" exclusively to their own advantage. In doing this, they have even used metaphysical, abstruse and transcendental claims to exclusive "empowerment" for themselves, such as having an emissary status bestowed on them by a divine power. In contemporary history, Bush, Blair and Musharraf, all three of them, have claimed God's inspiration in their ascendancy to political command.

The interesting phenomenon in this context is the analysis of the methods that elite groups have used from time immemorial to legitimise their control over power. During the Egyptian Pharaoh's era, 3000 BC to 30 BC, the ruling elite even married their sisters and daughters to retain absolute control over economic and political supremacy. In today's Pakistan, the Peoples Party "loyalists", jayalas and stalwarts are busy inventing all kinds of symbolic and political tactics to justify and legitimise what they consider the PPP's co-chairman's righteous prerogative to the presidency.

However, the PPP's Central Committee's decision to name Asif Zardari as a presidential candidate for September 6 elections (a presidential election schedule hurriedly decided by the PPP with a specific agenda and without consultations with other parties) is politically incorrect.