London: worth it or a waste of time?
By Ayaz Amir
Friday, July 13,2007
THINGS to do with Pakistani politics, especially the grand knights who pass for its leading figures, are best viewed from a distance. At close quarters they are all too likely to induce morbidity and depression. The beat of distant drums: always more impressive.
It has to be said that there is no cure yet known to medical science for Pakistan’s disease of verbosity. If only Gen Musharraf was given to excessive talking (in his nearly eight years in power he has set new standards on this score) it would be a problem that could still be handled. But the disease runs across the spectrum.
Place a mike before a Pakistani politico, or put him on television, and Polonius’s dictum about brevity being the soul of wit will be stood on its head. Our poets can encapsulate large truths in few words; not, for the life of them, our politicos. So it proved at the All Parties Conference at the Gloucester Millennium Hotel in Central London. The speeches could have been better focused and they could have been shorter.
Instead of reliving past battles — as over the 17th Constitutional Amendment and the response to the killing of Nawab Bugti — democracy’s cause would have been better served if the paladins there assembled had remained focused on how to prevent Pakistan’s current military redeemer (fourth in a line which doesn’t seem to end) from getting himself ‘re-elected’ by the present soon-to-be-dead assemblies.
This and no other is the central question of our politics today. Other issues, including that of general elections and how best to fight them, come later. Do the opposition parties have a plan regarding this central question? If they do, it is a closely guarded secret.
Smothered in the text of the wordy resolution (it could easily have been cut by half) passed by the conference was a weak paragraph affirming the intent of the parties to resist the generalissimo’s ‘re-election’ by the present assemblies by all means at their disposal, including resignations.
What other means at their disposal do they have? The only weapon in their armoury is quitting the assemblies, thus dealing a fatal blow to Musharraf’s electoral college. But if the resolution was not more categorical on this point, it merely reflected the differing priorities of the bigger parties.
Among them only the PML-N ploughs a hard and uncompromising line — as well it might because it is out in the cold and it is the one party, for reasons well known, that cannot come to any arrangement with Gen Musharraf.
The MMA’s holy fathers, especially Maulana Fazlur Rahman, on the other hand, have a huge stake in this dispensation, enjoying the kind of importance they have never had before. Would they sacrifice it for the sake of abstruse arguments?
The holy fathers realise that if Musharraf goes, the major beneficiaries will be the larger parties and not them. Why should they then be the foot-soldiers in a campaign whose fruits fall into other laps? So while for the sake of appearances they make the right noises about democracy, they take good care not to be carried away by their own rhetoric.
One has to hand it to Maulana Fazlur Rahman for being a smart politician. He is seldom at a loss for words and so it was at the APC, although you could tell that even at his most vociferous he kept his options wide open.
The PPP seemed to be a study in embarrassment. Its delegates led by the hapless Makhdoom Amin Fahim were not their own masters, having constantly to check with their leader who was in Paris before agreeing to anything. Sherry Rehman, now very much the PPP’s English-speaking Nahid Khan (the original Nahid Khan more at home in vernacular things) was constantly fiddling with her elegant laptop, perhaps (unless I am grossly mistaken) sending e-mails to her boss about what was transpiring.
If the PPP’s aim was to keep things confused and uncertain, it succeeded because the wishy-washiness of the resolution owes as much to its studied ambivalence as to any confusion in the minds of the drafters.
The PPP’s greatest uneasiness was about the proviso of resigning from the assemblies. It wanted the words “the option of resignations” instead of plain resignations. This generated much backroom heat and anguish, and no doubt frenzied communications with the Mohtarma in Paris.
While these parleys were on a PML-N leader (whom I will not name) whispered into my ear that something “major” (or did he say dramatic?) was about to be agreed upon, his manner virtually suggesting that a new communist manifesto — calling upon the people of Pakistan to unite and assuring them that they had nothing to lose but their chains — was about to be signed.
At last the word “options” was struck out, leaving the PML-N delegates looking triumphant. It gives a good idea of someone’s plight when such straws are clutched for comfort.
Did the opposition parties have to travel all the way to London to advertise not so much their differences as their lack of resolve and purpose? In the event, what the conference highlighted were: the PPP’s readiness for a deal with the generals, Maulana Fazlur Rahman’s cleverness (whose skill must be applauded in running simultaneously with the government and the opposition), and the PML-N’s desperation for something (anything ) with which to hit the general and his government.
Small wonder, the Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy, which throughout its fraught existence was hard put to show that it had caused a single leaf to stir, is dead, unable to withstand these convulsions. Question is: when was it ever alive? Its death now is a death many times postponed.
On Wednesday afternoon this death was formalised when Amin Fahim walked out of a meeting of APC heads, the pretext probably that the PPP could not sit with the MMA. As I was writing these lines a new alliance was announced, All Pakistan Democratic Movement, its convenor Raja Zafarul Haq, once upon a time hailed by General Zia (this was prior to the 1985 elections) as his “opening batsman”. Let me not say anything more as Raja Zafarul Haq is a friend.
At the press conference following the announcement of the new alliance, Maulana Fazlur Rahman was asked whether the MMA would quit the Balochistan government. His answer was vintage Fazlur Rahman. It was for us to determine, he said, whether being in that government would hinder the MMA from playing a vanguard role in the struggle for democracy. In other words: none of your business.
Nawaz Sharif’s problem is acute. He is sitting in London whereas the battlefield today is Pakistan. What he awaits is a miracle which somehow, sweeping aside all obstacles, takes him to Pakistan. Barring that miracle he chews the cud of disappointment. This prompts the question whether the fateful decision taken in 2000 to leave the country has been expiated in full? If only it was that easy to escape the consequences of one’s actions.
One comparison must be made. Compare the lack of focus and direction of Pakistan’s politicians with the extraordinary unity and clarity of the lawyers’ movement and it needs no genius to figure out why our political elite has lost credibility and the lawyers’ movement has come to command respect. The lawyers have done not only what they could but more than anyone thought them capable of.
Their movement and the example set by Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry gave the country an opening, for the first time in seven and a half years putting Musharraf on the defensive. It was for Pakistan’s democratic forces to exploit this opening and turn it into a breach. In proving themselves incapable of anything of the kind they may have missed their moment.
Another opposition alliance, another anodyne resolution: could any yawn be bigger than this? People in Pakistan were expecting a clear call for action. What they have been treated to is a picture of more confusion and vacillation. As so often before, the political elite has let down the interests it purports to represent.
But the lawyers’ movement is still alive and the Supreme Court has still to deliver its verdict in Justice Chaudhry’s case. So perhaps all is not lost. If the political leadership has created a vacuum it is mistaken if it thinks no one will step forward to fill it.
http://www.dawn.com/weekly/ayaz/ayaz.htm