POLITICS

Politics is an art of management along the line of pleasing the people and God. As long as governments protect the people from evil with their power and sovereignty and defend them from oppression with their justice, politics can be considered successful and full of promise for the future. If governments act to the contrary, the candles of prosperity soon go out. Later they fall and leave behind turmoil amidst sounds of cursing.

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These points are very important for good administration and politics: the thought of rights, the superiority of the law, the consciousness of duty, the understanding of responsible in crude and difficult jobs and skill and expertise in refined and delicate jobs.

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Rather than the government’s saying "My nation," it’s more important that the nation say "My government" regarding those in power; I think this is what is sought after. Otherwise, if the nation sees the government as a line of parasites, it means that the body has long since broken off from the head.

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Government means justice and public order. It’s not possible to speak of government where these do not exist

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If the officials running a good and virtuous state are chosen because of the nobility in their essences, ideas and feelings, that state is a good and strong one. Even if a government that has encountered the misfortune of appointing officials who lack these high qualities is a government, it’s not a good one and definitely will not be long-lived. Because the bad behavior of these officials without high moral qualities will sooner or later appear as dark spots on the face of the government and blacken it in the consciences of the people.

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Public officials should be kind in their behavior within the law and according to the softness of their consciences. In this way, they will protect their own honor and the honor of the law and the state. It shouldn’t be forgotten that extreme harshness will cause unexpected explosions, and extreme softness will cause the society to become a fertile ground for illegitimate ideas.

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Laws are effective all the time, everywhere and for everyone. Those who enforce them should be both brave and just so that while the masses fear them on the one hand, they shouldn’t lose their trust and feeling of security, on the other hand.

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Magnificent governments are born from magnificent nations. Magnificent nations are born from sovereignty of knowledge, financial opportunities, and spiritual generations with broad consciousness and special individuals that make the struggle to "be oneself."

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However important unity of feeling, thought and culture are for a nation to be strong, the disintegration of religious and moral unity are that effective in the dissolution of that nation.

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There is a policy for everything; the policy preparing the renewal of the nation is, without thinking of anything—not even one’s own pleasure—to expand with only the nation’s pleasures and bend over with its pain.

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Possessing differing thoughts and opinions is the task of mature people. However, no one has the right to be tolerant towards the understanding and views that separate our people into camps and destroy society. Tolerance towards division means closing one’s eye to the nation’s extinction.

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Regarding people who don’t think like you and have a different world-view, but at the same time might be very sincere and beneficial, don’t oppose every idea that seems contradictory to yours and scare them off. In fact, you should definitely seek ways to benefit from their opinions and ideas and strike up a dialogue with them. Otherwise, those unhappy ones that are kept at a distance because they don’t think like us will form huge masses that confront and smash us. Even if these unhappy ones have not shown any positive accomplishments throughout human history, the number of states they’ve destroyed is too great to count.

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Regardless from whom it comes, man should know how to benefit from the knowledge and views of others that can affect the interest of his own system, his own thought and his own world. He should never neglect benefiting from the experience of others.

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Those who understand politics only as political parties, propaganda, elections and the struggle for power are making a mistake. Politics is a management art with a broad perspective that thinks of today along with tomorrow and tomorrow along with the next day. It takes into consideration the satisfaction of the people along with the approval of God.

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The domonace of power is transitory. What remains is the domination of the Truth and justice. Even if these don’t exist today, they will definitely be victorious in the very near future. For this reason, the greatest politics should be sought on the side of God and justice.

Having dominated the national scene longer than any of his chief rivals, Gen Musharraf should go to the people in 2007 with his own, new party rather than continue to rely on the defectors from other parties.

DR Mubashir Hasan in his interview published in this newspaper last Monday quotes Mao Zedong and Zhou en-Lai telling Z.A. Bhutto not try to reform a political party but to form a new one. Impressed by that advice, Bhutto, after he broke away from Ayub’s Convention Muslim League, went on to form the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) which gave a new dimension to Pakistan’s politics.

That only a new party and not an old one though reformed can achieve the political goal it has set for itself is also borne out by the example of Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy’s Awami League which was founded on the basis of autonomy but that later, radicalized by Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, led East Pakistan to independence. Trying to reform a party really amounts to breaking it up into factions.

In more recent times, the MQM is yet another example of a new party unifying and galvanizing Mohajirs into a political force which wouldn’t have been possible to achieve through existing parties. The MQM was able to chalk out for itself a charter which was economic and secular in character while the older parties were bogged down in political ideologies or in religious schisms.

The Muslim League has been subjected to many reforms. Resultantly, today it has 10 factions, some among them little known but each claiming to be the true heir to the founding party of the country. The successors in office to M.A. Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan have indeed been proliferating — and then vanishing with equal rapidity.

The same fate now besets the PPP. A new and reformed faction of the Muslim League, however, remains the most convenient vehicle for entry into politics and then transiting from military to civil regime. After Ayub Khan and Ziaul Haq now Pervez Musharraf looks set on that course. Recent utterances by politicians close to Musharraf leave little doubt about it.

Sheikh Rashid, the information minister who is also the government’s spokesman, has said more than once that all the four, or five, dams on Indus will be built in Musharraf’s time. Minister Sher Afgan has also spoken in the same manner. Both seem to suggest a time span of 15 or more years for Musharraf’s presidency. The Punjab chief minister, Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi, has been more specific. To him, it is beyond debate or doubt that parliament and the provincial assemblies elected in 2007 will once again elect Musharraf as president. His premise is simple: Punjab stands solidity behind him and other provinces, too, will support him because he always acts in the national interest.

President Musharraf’s own pronouncements and plans also strongly suggest that he intends to continue in office beyond 2007. The only point that remains to be decided is whether he would also continue as chief of army staff. Pervaiz Elahi says he would. He couldn’t be saying it on his own.

The Punjab chief minister and the other ministers, too, seem to take it for granted that in the 2007 elections their faction of the Muslim League would have an overall majority in the National Assembly, the Senate and the provincial assemblies and their candidate Musharraf would get elected. The parliament and the courts might once again find a way for him to remain the army chief but Musharraf would have several troubling questions to answer before he publicly becomes a party to the Elahi-Rashid plan.

First, he has to consider the advice Mao and Zhou en-Lai gave to Bhutto. President Musharraf has his own views on statecraft and governance and when the next election comes up he will have completed eight years in public life. Shouldn’t he form a party of his own to contest the election in 2007 instead of leaning on a tiered and brittle Muslim League?

The politicians who gathered around General Musharraf when he seized power in 1999 and have held on to him since then do not necessarily share his ideas on state policies. Those who came defecting from Muslim League claim to be the “spiritual allies” of the orthodox religious parties. Those coming from the PPP were either aggrieved with the party leadership or, like the defecting Muslim Leaguers, wished to escape the rigours of accountability and prison. In any case, in no sense of the term do they constitute a party much less a party that agrees with Musharraf’s ideas on politics.

The elements from the Muslim League, the PPP and other smaller parties surrounding Musharraf all retain their original party affiliations and in fact claim to be its true adherents. They have kept their options open to reunite with their estranged leaders whenever circumstances permit or their political interests are better served. Musharraf should be wary of staking his political future on this wayward motley crowd.

Musharraf’s plan to remain president beyond 2007 is hardly a matter of conjecture now. He is also committed to build Kalabagh dam, exterminate religious militants (or terrorists) as an ally of America and to modernize Pakistan.

To strive for it all he needs to do is to make a party of his own with a manifesto that incorporates his concept of “enlightened moderation” in terms more specific than a mere slogan. The votaries of orthodoxy and extremism riding his bandwagon thus would have a hard choice before them.

Elections held to the assemblies in 2007 in which the party lines are not clearly drawn nor are all parties freely allowed to participate will have no credibility nor would the president whom they elect. The campaign leading up to the polls is bound to unleash all the political forces that were shackled in 2002 while their leaders were on the run.

Having dominated the national scene longer than any of his chief rivals, Gen Musharraf should go to the people in 2007 with his own, new party rather than continue to rely on the old machinations of the defectors from other parties.