After World War II dictatorship did not become extinct. It appeared in new forms in most of the countries in Asia and Africa which had become independent after the War.
All these countries started their careers with democratic institutions, generally of the parliamentary type, but barring a few, all of them succumbed to some form or other of dictatorial rule.
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But Hitler lying dead and burning in his Berlin bunker and Mussolini’s dead body strung upside down on a gibbet for the crowd’s jeer had made these dictators wiser. They had realized that autocracy in its naked form and the myth of leadership as preached by the totalitarians, would no longer keep them in power for long. They tempered their autocracy with constitutional process.
They ascribed their rise to power to inexorable circum-stances and promised to bring about conditions for the restoration of democracy which the earlier regimes had corrupted and demoralised. The present day dictators, therefore, made democracy an umbrella to shelter their authoritarian rule.
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General Naguib’s coup d’etat in Egypt forced King Farouk to abdicate. Naguib was soon replaced by Colonel Nasser. But when his authority was fully entrenched, he summoned a Constituent Assembly and entrusted it with the duty to formulate a republican constitution. Colonel Nasser was elected President under the new Constitution.
Autocratic traditions, however, lingered on and they formed a conspicuous feature of the new Constitution. In 1964, another Constitution came into being with democratic traditions. Nasser was the President of the United Arab Republic and was succeeded, after his demise, by Sadat without any diminution in the Presidential authority and there is none even now with Mubbarak in the Presidential Palace.
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In Pakistan, General Ayub Khan with the help of Iskander Mirza, President of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, captured power in October 1958, by a military cout d’etat. The Constitution was abrogated, Martial Law promulgated and political parties banned. The constitutional machinery, thus, totally disappeared.
Having fully established himself in power, Ayub forced Iskander Mirza to quit his office and virtually banished him from the country. In January 1960, Ayub Khan decreed setting up of local bodies elected through the scheme of controlled elections. In February these local bodies elected General Ayub Khan as the President of Pakistan.
In 1961-62, the President devised the contrivance of “Basic Democracies”, which in all its essentials was identical to his previous scheme of local bodies, except for the attractive name of ‘democracy’ and that too ‘basic’. Through the process of restricted elections some 1,500,000 voters, out of Pakistan’s total population of 100 million, elected near-about 80,000 members of the “Basic Democracies.”
The “Basic Democrats” elected General Ayub as the President and conferred upon him the rank of Field Marshal. The “Basic Democrats” also elected the National Assembly as well as the Provincial Assemblies of East and West Pakistan.
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Pakistan adopted a Constitution of the Presidential type in 1963 and elections there under were held by the end of 1964. Pakistan was again in turmoil in 1969 and Ayub Khan declared Martial Law on March 25, abrogated the Constitution and appointed General Yahya Khan as the Chief Marshal Law Administrator.
Yahya Khan partially restored the 1963 Constitution and assumed the powers of the President. He abdicated after the 1971 Indo-Pak conflict and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto succeeded him as the President and Chief Martial Law Administrator, with a promise to restore democracy.
The democratic Islamic Constitution of Pakistan became operative on August 14, 1973 with Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto as the first Prime Minister enjoying unprecedented powers unknown in the annals of parliamentary democracy.
General Zia-ul-Haq’s coup in 1977 again established the military regime in Pakistan. He did not abrogate the 1973 Constitution, but drastically altered it to enable the Martial Law Administration to act expeditiously and effectively.
General Haq assumed the office of the President and combined unto himself the offices of the Chief of the Army Staff and the Chief Martial Law Administrator. He promised to restore civilian rule and democratic institutions soon after normalcy was restored.
He fed the people with the same promise for full five years, ultimately switching on to the ideology of Islamic democracy. Political parties were banned, strict censorship of the press was enforced and powers and jurisdiction of the judiciary drastically curtailed by amending the 1973 Constitution through the medium of Presidential Ordinances.
President Soekamo of Indonesia introduced the myth of “guided” or “controlled” democracy. Immediately after the assumption of power Soekarno dissolved the National Assembly. He constituted his Council of Ministers drawn from all political parties, thereby giving it the complexion of a national government, but all the ministers were chosen at the President’s will and they were responsible to him alone.
They represented no one except the President, expressed his will and executed his policies. Any direct or indirect opposition was crushed with a heavy hand. Soekarno was deprived of his power and authority as President in March 1967. Subharto succeeded him, retaining the same political and administrative apparatus.
In almost all the States which had become independent during the past two decade or so, there are Party dictatorships with almost unrestricted powers within the framework of a democratic mechanism. Opposition has been ruthlessly suppressed in all these countries and in some of them, as in Ghana, parliamentary institutions have also been abrogated and even the powers of the judiciary considerably curtailed.
The leaders heading the governments of all these countries are those who had led their countries and won independence for them. The justification for concentration of power and the reasons for suppressing the opposition are the same as advanced by the dictators in Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia, Iraq and other countries.
Exercise of such a power, they plead, is necessary to protect their countries from all possibilities of revolution, to maintain the independence and integrity of the State, and to accelerate the pace of prosperity of the people.
Algeria also saw military dictatorship brought about by the chief of the Army Staff, Colonel Hourai Boumedienne. Previously Algiers was a one-party dictatorship under President Ben Bella and Colonel Hourai Boumedienne was the greatest supporter of the President.
From this survey, it is clear that many developing countries are something short of dictatorships, military or totalitarian, and yet are short of democracies. The spectrum of immediate forms and styles of political organisation and operation is broad.
Legislative assemblies, for instance, go through all the legislative processes and perform their normal functions, and may exercise some power, but it is largely window-dressing.
Frequently the effective leadership in these countries “is consciously making use of democratic forms to build the requisites of democracy to the point where substance may be added to the form of democracy.” Edward Shils has coined the term “tutelary democracy” for these regimes. In them one party is dominant but other parties are tolerated.
The dominant party is itself far from monolithic, containing numerous divergent elements. Top leaders of the dominant party tend to occupy the highest posts in government. Charismatic leadership is heavily relied upon. Such a regime may better be called authoritarian rather than “tutelary democracy.”
A totalitarian regime is differentiated from an authoritarian system by its total control over and attempt to regulate behaviour and by the subordination of all organizations to the State. In authoritarian regimes, as explained earlier, liberty is restricted and parliamentary institutions are absent or meaningless but the system is not tyrannical.
The society is traditionally oriented, and power is exercised by small groups, such as military leaders, bureaucrats or religious figures. In a totalitarian regime not only power is concentrated in the hands of an individual or group, but also the regime does not tolerate opposition.
The regime is totalitarian in that the totality of social life is considered a legitimate matter for political control. In practice, social control is not total but the scope of government is, nevertheless, very great compared with other political systems. The control that is exercised is by a relatively small group sustained by a single mass political party, a monopoly of the mass media of communication, and a subservient judiciary.
The constant dilemma for authoritarian systems is that rebellion or revolution is the only way to register disaffection. Coup d’etat is now the normal feature of authoritarian regimes and it is so frequent and widespread in Africa and some parts of Asia particularly that it seldom causes a flutter in international politics. In fact, recognition for the new regimes is as much a matter of routine as the Coup itself.