The recent events in Cairo, on June 30 and July 3, first the Army issuing an ultimatum to the democratically elected leader to bring order to the escalating civic unrest or else face dismissal and second, its eventual removal of the President raises the question as to whether the 'Tahrir Square Revolution' has died a premature death. Surprisingly, the answer to this from the very protagonists of the revolution is a resounding 'No'. They, the urban liberal intelligentsia, the mainstream media, the youth, leading lights of the judiciary, the minority Coptics and the so-called civil society groups firmly maintain that this is not a coup and it is still a continuation of the revolution. Naming and correctly characterising the recent events has been an obsessive occupation, these days, of the widely read 'Al-Ahram' intellectuals.
Significantly, it is also of crucial interest to two important stakeholders in Egypt, its Army and the US State Department. The Army, of-course, says that there has been no sudden and violent overthrow of the regime and that it acted out of desperation to prevent further sliding of the country into chaos. It further claims that it acted after a massive popular appeal signed by over 22 million Egyptians calling for the dismissal of President Morsi's government. It also gave repeated and sufficient notices to the government to start a dialogue with the Opposition and that it was left with no other choice. The US Administration has carefully desisted from calling it a coup, as doing so would kick in a host of sanctions, under the 'Egypt Accountability and Democracy Promotion Act' and certainly they would not like to hurt their decades-old strategic partner, the Egyptian Army.
The Muslim Brotherhood (MB), which had legitimately won the first ever free and fair elections in the 5000-year history of the country, claims that democracy has been subverted and that the Army has acted against a clear and precise verdict of the majority. The arrest of President Morsi and top leaders of MB and the resultant violent clashes of July 8, claiming the lives of over 50 MB supporters, is indicative of a violent and brutal assertion of the bullet over the ballot, they claim.
Indeed, the MB's case is quite compelling and persuasive. For all practical purposes, it looks like a coup, sounds like a coup and the behaviour was like a coup. Of-course, the Army has appointed a civilian President, Vice President and Prime Minister and has given them a seven-month time table to restore democracy by revising the Constitution, holding parliamentary and presidential elections. This obviously means that they want their kind of Constitution, their kind of Parliament and their man as President.
This is indeed a subversion of majority will exercised through the ballot. These are the very acts of liberal, secular and progressive minded people that push moderate Islam into extremist Islam and convince them that democracy is a sham and that electoral politics is always loaded against the poor, illiterate and the backward. Islam, Islamic Constitutionalism and the Sharia become their instruments of choice against the Western imported 'democracy'.
The MB, after being in the underground for almost 80 years, had hesitantly agreed to step into the arena of electoral politics and won a convincing majority both in the parliamentary and presidential elections in end-2011 and June 2012. The first was nullified by the Judiciary and second by the Army. It is not because the MB had challenged the power of these two great pillars of the Establishment. In fact, the MB quietly accepted all the judicial verdicts, some of which quashed the popular will, and also ensured a privileged position to the Army in the Constitution, drafted by an Islamist dominated Constituent Assembly. It is untenable to argue that the Army's economic interests were threatened by the rising power of the MB. They are as safe as they were during the Mubarak era. No doubt, President Morsi sacked the old guard of the Supreme Council of Armed Forces, in one single sweep, after an Al-Qaeda sponsored terrorist attack on the Army's border check-posts in the Sinai, near an Israeli crossing point in August 2012. But that was widely applauded as an assertion of civilian power over the military by the liberal democrats in Egypt. Now they cannot call him authoritarian.
There is repeated criticism that Morsi had promised an all-inclusive government, by co-opting the Opposition elements into his cabinet, during his campaigning and that after coming to power, he failed to fulfil that promise. In all democracies, the winner takes all. If Morsi had underestimated the popularity of the MB and had, therefore, promised to be the leader of a coalition and subsequently did not feel the need for such a coalition, no one can blame him or his government of being less democratic.
The problem with the liberal, secular and progressive class of Egypt is that they do not have the organisational strength, nor the grass-root support that the MB has, nor were they all united in an anti-MB coalition. Possibly, if the Wafd, the Justice Party, the Democratic Front and the Social Democrats had all united before the Parliamentary elections, they might have fared better than the Salafist outfit, the al-Nour party, a newly created political grouping, that managed an impressive second position in the parliamentary polls. It may well be argued that the liberal middle class intelligentsia, having failed to win the electoral battles, relied on the Army to bring them to power. Or that the Army, which was unhappy with this entire democratic exercise that disenfranchised them, is now relying on the liberal intelligentsia to provide the much needed respectability and credibility. Either way, it is unfortunate for Egypt that the crisis that started in January 2011 is yet to be resolved.
What is equally alarming is the rush of regional powers to fish in troubled waters. The immediate announcement of $12 billion by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and UAE, coming to bail out the new regime that has deposed the Qatari protégé -- the Muslim Brotherhood, is a clear indication of the interests of regional stakeholders. The eviction of MB from power in Cairo may have significant implications on the course of the civil war in Syria too. The shape of regional politics has definitely taken a new turn.
(The writer is a Visiting Distinguished Fellow at Observer Research Foundation, Delhi)
The views expressed above belong to the author(s). ORF research and analyses now available on Telegram! Click here to access our curated content — blogs, longforms and interviews.
PREV
