GENERAL Musharraf has said more than once that his government will not allow Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto to contest the coming elections. Strictly speaking, Nawaz Sharif is a convicted felon who was released from the prison on the basis of a “plea bargain” in which he agreed to remove himself and his family from Pakistan for a period of time. He can try to renegotiate this bargain but, as things stand now, he cannot return to Pakistan as a free agent in the near future.

There may have been allegations of malfeasance against some of his family members, but none has been convicted of any crime. The return of some of them, notably Shahbaz Sharif, and their freedom to participate in politics might be a fit subject of consideration in any renegotiation of the original bargain on the ground that it would serve the public interest in some important way. I shall return to this point shortly.

While numerous criminal cases are pending against Benazir Bhutto, she has not been convicted in any of them so far. If I remember correctly she was declared an “absconder” in one or two of them. She could then be arrested and detained upon returning to Pakistan. On the other hand, the government could allow her to be free on bail and do her electioneering even as she defended herself in the courts. Once again, the government should accommodate Ms Bhutto in this fashion because her participation in the coming elections might be in the public interest.

Before going on to other considerations, let me mention a related problem. During his first term as prime minister, Nawaz Sharif’s government filed a number of charges against Benazir Bhutto and her husband. When the latter came to power the second time her government withdrew these charges and, in turn, proceeded to file charges against Nawaz Sharif and some of his associates. When Nawaz Sharif returned to power, his government withdrew the ongoing court cases against him, and filed cases against Benazir Bhutto and Asif Zardari which are still going on.

Suppose Benazir contests the elections in October, wins a resounding victory, and becomes prime minister a third time. What will happen to the cases against her? Should she be able to withdraw them? What if the courts, or the president and the army, say she can’t? Will the government, of which she herself is the head, prosecute her in half a dozen or more criminal cases? It would be a messy, ugly, and unprecedented situation.

How is the public interest involved in all of this? A very vocal school of opinion within Pakistan, and among the Pakistanis living in America, contends that the October elections will not be regarded as free and fair unless Nawaz Sharif (or perhaps a nominee of his) and Benazir Bhutto are allowed to contest without let or hindrance. The assumption underlying this contention is that these two politicians are hugely popular; certainly more popular than any other. The second underlying assumption is that their followers are unconcerned with the charges against them: either because they think the charges are bogus; or because they believe that a bit of criminal activity on the part of their leaders is acceptable so long as they also do something for the people.

Let the will of the people prevail, say the “democrats,” even if that will is misguided. Rule of law is not something to which either the people or their rulers accord high priority. Similar attitudes have sway among the people next door in India. Not long ago the people of Tamil Nadu heartily approved of Madam Jayalalitha to be their chief minister even though she was a convicted criminal. Indian and Pakistani parties have often awarded “tickets” to gangsters because they were likely to win in their constituencies. Follow the will of the people, whatever it may be, and hope that in time it will become better informed—so the argument goes.

There is still another perspective on this issue. Let bygones be bygones, take care of the present, and look to the future; stop digging dirt in selected places, for there is dirt in all backyards, including your own. Moreover, in many cases, this quest for accountability has turned out to be nothing more than an exercise in futility. Nawaz Sharif’s government spent many millions of rupees looking for evidence that would help convict Ms Bhutto and her husband. Cases against them have gone on in courts for years, but neither has been convicted of any crime. So, then, stop this scandalous travesty of law enforcement.

Surely there is more to democracy than unquestioning obedience to the will of the people which, in effect, means the will of the majority. It has always been recognized that, acting from passion and prejudice or ignorance, majorities will sometime be wrong or unjust. That is why wiser men have included in the constitutions they framed bills of rights that no law may override and placed other restraints on the majority’s determinations. A distinction is sometimes made between statesmen and politicians, the former being those who will place the public interest above the will of the people if, in their best judgment, the two are not the same, and do so even at the cost of their own careers.

The dictate of the public interest with regard to the participation of Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto in the October elections is not entirely clear. Honest men can disagree on this issue and something can be said for both sides. I have already stated some of the reasons that have been advanced for letting them in. A couple of additional considerations may be allowed.

Public interest will obviously be well served if the elections give us a government that commands stable majority support in parliament. Does the army want such a result? Regardless of the inclinations of individual officers, the army should want this result if it values democratic governance. Checks and balances can be had even with a stable political government in place. They do not require a government that is tottering all the time and is therefore ineffective.

Let us now ask which party is the most likely to put together a stable government. Barring the PML’s overwhelming victory in 1997, no party won a clear majority of seats in the National Assembly in the three previous elections (1988, 1990, and 1993). Nor is any single party likely to win this kind of majority in October. We will probably have to settle for a coalition government. A coalition of a large number of little parties and groups will neither be stable nor coherent. We should look for a party with a substantial number of assembly seats joining hands with one or, at the most two, others to form a government. Which party is likely to be able to answer this call?

Reports about winners in the recent local elections give some reason to expect that the PPP might turn out to be such a party, especially if Benazir Bhutto is able to lead its campaign. If this expectation is well founded, her participation in the election would appear to be an important ingredient of the public interest. If she is personally repugnant to the general, he should set aside his own reservations in the public interest. She made a “deal” with the army chief (General Aslam Beg) and President Ghulam Ishaq Khan, conceding them pre-eminence in certain policy areas, before she could be sworn in as prime minister in 1988. Surely a deal can be made again, giving the general assurances with regard to his own continuance in office and the continuity of his policy orientations.

On the other hand, it is also a part of the public interest to compel our major parties to get away from dynastic and personalized leadership, learn to function without their leaders in exile, and become viable institutions. It does nobody any good if it transpires that there is nothing to the PPP besides Ms Bhutto, or that the PML (N) is nothing but a dummy without Nawaz Sharif.

The PML (N), led by Nawaz Sharif or his brother (Shahbaz), would ordinarily be expected to emerge from the election as a major force in the assembly. But even if the complications relating to the Sharifs’ return, mentioned earlier, are set aside, the party has to contend with another difficulty, which is that most of its leading members have defected to form PML (QA). Can Sharif win without them, or can he persuade them to disband their faction and return to stand under his banner?

Between now and the elections, there may not be enough time to negotiate and implement such a manoeuvre. Moreover, if it is true that the PML likes to be the “king’s party,” then considering that the “king” does not care to befriend Sharif, his former lieutenants may be reluctant to return to his fold. One may then conclude that the chances of a big electoral victory for the PML (N) this October are not exactly bright.

With most of the “leading lights” of the old PML now assembled in the PML (QA), it is not unlikely that, even without the present government’s support, it will emerge as the second largest party in the assembly. If unpleasant memories of previous conflicts can be put aside, as they often are in politics, a coalition between this party — the PML (QA) — and the PPP might not be a bad idea. Both parties are pragmatic; deep down, neither is committed to any particular ideology. It remains to be seen what they will actually do and what the general will let them do.

SHAHBAZ Sharif is living in exile only because he is brother of Nawaz Sharif. No charge is known to have been raised against him, nor referred to an investigating agency or a tribunal.

From time to time the press carries reports variedly on Shahbaz’s eagerness to return to assert his brother’s control over his disintegrating party, or to revert from politics to his own entrepreneurial skills, to run his family charity or even to help his tormentors turn the economy round for that must get precedence over power politics. None of that happening, he is said to be ready even to walk from the returning plane into a prison van because for him to live in a lonely cell at home would be less burdensome than Jeddah’s cloistered comfort.

A story making the rounds from the early years of Zia-ul-Haq’s martial law has it that when General Jilani, the then Punjab Governor, asked the patriarch of the Sharif clan to give one of his sons to him to run Zia-ul-Haq’s politics, Nawaz was put forward. The General asked for Shahbaz. “Who would then manage the family business which must outlast politics” was the concern the elder Sharif expressed, for Nawaz to him was an idler and the third brother was a proselytizer. That clinched the argument and cast the die for the people of Pakistan. The idler turned into a leader and twice became the country’s prime minister.

Yet another story has it that when Nawaz Sharif became prime minister for the second time, the father foisted Shahbaz on an unwilling Nawaz to prevent him from goofing up yet again. That he nevertheless did. Shahbaz now contends, and he should be believed, that Nawaz never took him into confidence about his plans to get rid of Musharraf as chief of army staff in the manner he tried. Thus Shahbaz couldn’t save Nawaz as their father had envisaged instead he too went down with him first into a clink and then into exile.

The purpose in recounting this anecdotal background to Shahbaz Sharif’s entry into politics is to link it with the strike by ten thousand, may be more, bus operators last week after two young girls were crushed to death under their wheels. For once the streets of Karachi looked orderly and fresh as they used to be half a century ago but the workers couldn’t reach their factories nor the students their examination centres. It is a bizarre situation in which the country’s entrepot and its premier financial and communication centre is kept going by a most chaotic and archaic transport system extant in the civilized world.

Lahore, a city half of Karachi’s size and much less crucial to the economy of the country, had also descended into a public transport chaos rivalling Karachi’s when Shahbaz appeared on the scene as Punjab’s chief minister. In the months that followed, Lahore, Rawalpindi and Islamabad had bus fleets of the size, quality and regularity the people had not experienced before. A similar bus service has also made its debut in Multan with Faisalabad, Sargodha and Gujranwala fast lining up behind.

The Sindh government with a host of its specialized agencies has been planning a public transport system for Karachi for as long as a senior citizen can remember. Many years and dollars were invested in a mass transit plan comprising seven traffic corridors. It all sounded an ideal and lasting solution till the question came up how $650 million could be mustered to build, over four years, the very first corridor from Federal B Area to Merewether Tower to carry just 13 per cent of the city’s commuters. The government was not ready to provide even one-eighth of the amount to induce the lending agencies to provide the rest. The whole scheme if ever executed would have cost no less than $7000 million — twice as much as the highest-ever foreign currency reserves of the country. It was a chimera.

The new brainchild of the provincial and city governments is the rehabilitation and expansion of the Karachi circular railway. How the cost of Rs 12000 million would be met, how long would it take, how many people would benefit and, above all, who would manage it are the questions to which neither the government knows the answers nor would care to know for, like the mass transit of yesteryear, it appeals to them as a grand project to sell to the people to make them put up with degrading travel conditions for many more years.

Stepping down from the high pedestal of elevated corridors and an extended circular railway with spurs, the ministers and planners go round the world looking for low-platform, articulated or double-decker buses with zero smoke emission again ignoring the basic questions who would buy and operate them and whether the common people would be able to afford the fares. For some years now the people have been hearing of such modern buses waiting to be shipped at the European ports or on the high seas heading for Karachi. They have come to suspect it to be yet another subterfuge.

The Shahbaz solution that was economical, expeditious and worked successfully in Lahore is after all getting the attention of the cynical planners and politicians of Sindh. The responsibility for public transport now divided between the province and the city, the official machinery is grinding slower than usual even after Governor Mohammad Mian Soomro and his predecessor Azim Daudpota had deliberated for three years to approve the essential principles and approach of the Punjab scheme. Governor Soomro in his last meeting held in January decided all the basic issues and expected his officials to start implementing the scheme within two weeks. It took five weeks just to issue the minutes.

That is where Shahbaz Sharif comes in again and the difference he and his administration made to Lahore in many ways other than just public transport, and the havoc that has been played with Karachi. Lahore has improved with every passing day. Karachi has been deteriorating by the hour. This scribe has to share the burden of that guilt with the public representatives, military commanders, civil officials and entrepreneurs charged with the management of Sindh and its capital since independence. All of them have remained lost between their grand visions and petty squabbles while the other provinces — Punjab being the biggest, hence more pragmatic — made the best use of the opportunities that arose and forged ahead.

In Karachi, the mafia, blackmailers and marauders are blamed for running a third-rate transport. That done, the duty of the nazim, councillors and officials ends. In Lahore they have found a solution to the problem. The recent strike, and the threats that followed the death of young women, was not the first nor, would be, unfortunately, the last till the time the wayward, old, unfit individually-owned buses make way for regulated fleets.

Shahbaz Sharif is anxious to return home. The government must be equally anxious to keep him out of public life as it seems to find no basis in law to put him in jail. A thought, weird but in public interest, arises that he may be allowed to come back provided he agrees to serve as municipal chief for Karachi with all powers delegated to him to improve the public transport, stop the boiling gutters, fill up the potholes, plant trees, lift the garbage as he did in Lahore. He may then shift his constituency from Lahore to Karachi.

NARENDRA Modi has done enough by now to win the highest honour that a nation can give. Not our nation. What the chief minister of Gujarat truly deserves is the Nishan-i-Pakistan. There are at least two Indians who, to my knowledge, have received this high honour from Islamabad, the late Morarji Desai and Dilip Kumar.

Neither served the interest of Pakistan remotely as much as Modi has done in the last four weeks. For Narendra Modi has been trying to destroy the idea of India as a nation in which every citizen is equal irrespective of his faith. He has provided the evidence that was once offered only as an argument. That is not the only major favour that Narendra Modi has done to Pakistan. Till he started his lynch-mob response to the cruel tragedy of Godhra, all the negative focus of South Asia was concentrated on Pakistan and the state of terror that had been spawned by the state of Pakistan, to use a depressing pun.

Narendra Modi has, in a space of days, taken Pakistan off the world’s front pages and replaced it with Gujarat. Suddenly, the stories of violence and state-sponsored terror are all coming from Gujarat, each day’s tragedy focused through television cameras. If President Pervez Musharraf has not yet sent a ‘thank you’ letter to his benefactor in Ahmedabad, then the president is remiss.

The television camera has existed through all the stages of the Ayodhya movement, from its resurrection by Rajiv Gandhi, misled by Arun Nehru, to the searing Rathyatra of L.K. Advani, to the demolition of the Babri mosque in December 1992, to the riots and bomb blast that followed. But television as a news-force did not. Television news was still what Doordarshan chose to show you, and it did not choose to show you very much.

Zee was still an incipient dream of Subhash Chandra, offering fresh lines in entertainment that would eventually grow with extraordinary speed to become an empire. Star was but a faint glow over a Hong Kong sky, searching for a focus on India. CNN existed, but more in theory than in fact as cable had not yet begun to chain the living room to the box; BBC was still getting its act together. Channels like “Aaj Tak” and “Sahara” were not even conceived. E-mail did not exist.

Narendra Modi’s Gujarat has happened after the media revolution, when every story can become world news in a way that is unprecedented. Narendra Modi has shamed India before India and before the world. He has unhinged a crucial element in India’s sense of itself as a civilized democracy, and offered every television viewer an image of anarchy wreaking havoc with the wolfish help of a chief minister gone berserk. That image walked across the world, through the clearing house of American media, even as newspaper journalists confirmed its footprints with detail and analysis that created whirlpools of shock.

The shock was not about the violence itself; no one is so naive as to believe that any society can eliminate the horrors of internecine conflict. The shock was the daily sight and sound of a chief minister justifying lynch mobs, finding excuses for a pogrom and telling blatant lies that were broken up and exposed by reporters.

As if death, arson and revenge were not enough, Narendra Modi laced each day with another mental and emotional shock that pandered to the worst aspects of inhuman nature. He valued tragedy on different scales, offering what might be called a two-price theory for death: a Hindu life was worth twice the life of a Muslim. Even to write this seems obscene. Man has not been fortunate enough to create equality among the living but at least there used to be some comfort taken in the fact that death left us all equal.

Even that has changed. No responsible Indian has ever thought in this manner through all the horrors that we have witnessed in our nation since its bloodied birth. No Indian can. No Indian will, for such thinking lies outside the ethos, culture and civilization of my India. Modi belongs to a political party, the BJP, which calls itself more Indian than any other: I doubt if any such communal valuation ever occurred to Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee or home minister Lal Krishna Advani or human resources minister Murli Manohar Joshi, to name the triumvirate at the top of this political hierarchy.

Less dramatic perhaps, but of a piece with the twisted thinking that dominates Modi’s politics, are the lies that he has been using ad lib and at random and to everyone, including his own leaders about matters such as relief and rehabilitation.

What is it that makes Narendra Modi do what he has done? It cannot be politics alone. He is not the first Indian politician to have played politics with communal riots. That list is long and cuts across political parties. The conventional idea is that he was handed Gujarat at a time when the BJP had lost its moorings, and is doing what is necessary to reconsolidate the Hindu vote. The operative word here is “necessary”. For that becomes a subjective interpretation.

Cynicism comes naturally to a politician. Perhaps that is a natural defence mechanism in a difficult job. Cynicism is a non-partisan characteristic. Narendra Modi is not a cynical politician. Cynicism implies a degree of indifference, and Modi is not indifferent to anything. He is passionate in whatever he does. But his preferred passion is hatred. This is what makes him unique: he actually uses hatred as a political weapon, and employs both subtle and crude means to provoke a similar passion among others. You can see the difference in his eyes; there is gloat floating in them.

This is why it is especially dangerous to leave power in the hands of a man like him. It is almost implicit that anyone who has been soaked in the RSS version of Indian history has acquired a deep sense of grievance against Muslims, but Modi is not the only graduate from the RSS school. You do not see this intense, Nazi-type hatred in either the attitude or the behaviour of others from this school; the political stance, even when it is acrid, does not become a personal vendetta against a community.

The Gujarat carnage does not stop because Narendra Modi does not have the desire to stop it. In one sense he is helpless, because the vengeful emotion that controls him is far more powerful than any other competing force, even suggestions he may be receiving from his own periodic bouts of good sense. The desire to “punish” Muslims just a little more, to “teach them one last lesson” in some unknown village, to spread the political poison to yet another corner before supplies are curtailed becomes irresistible.

Where murder has been prevented by the arrival of civil society, pettiness takes over. Officers who have done their duty and shown that there is an India that can keep hold of its values through the haze of blood are transferred. Relief to refugee camps is held back so that hunger may revive dried tears.

Hatred generates far greater energy than love; that is one of the tragedies of human existence. Love is warm blood; hatred is cold blood. If you need a vehicle for your hate, Mr Modi, direct it at the evildoers who are guilty; no one will stop you from bringing the guilty of Godhra to justice, and let them rot in their own hell. But to hate the innocent is depravity.

No government can prevent an incident, however evil it might be. Perhaps an instant reaction is also unavoidable. But the margin of error disappears after that. One of the first instructions given to a civil servant during training is how to stop a mob. There are instances in Narendra Modis Gujarat itself where civil servants have done their duty because their conscience was above the signals of hate they were receiving.

One serious difficulty about using hate as policy is that at some point it begins to consume the perpetrator. Maybe Narendra Modi does not understand this, heady as he is with life-and-death power; what is surprising is that Mr Vajpayee refuses to see what is obvious. He is of course being told what Modi wants him to hear; that this politics of revenge has made Modi into some kind of hero, and that this “heroism” will deliver votes. If Mr Vajpayee believes this then he does not believe a single line of what he himself has written as a poet.

Strange coincidence. Just as I had written the last sentence, a colleague entered my office and handed me an agency story. It was the text of a new poem by the Prime Minister, written in Nainital.

Geet nahin gata hoon. / Benaqab chehre hain / Dagh barhe gehre hain / Toota tilism aaj / Sach se bhay khaata hoon / Geet nahin gaata hoon. / Lagi kuch aisi nazar / Bikhra sheeshe ka shahar / Apnon ke mele mein / Meet nahin paata hoon / Peeth mein churi-sa chand / Rahu gaya rekha phand / Mukti ke shaano mein / Bandh jaata hoon. / Geet nahin gaata hoon.

(I cannot sing a song. The masks are off; the wounds are deep; the mystery is gone; I am afraid of truth; I cannot sing a song. The eye is evil; the city of glass is shattered; even among my own I cannot find my love. The knife in the back is like a moon, and Rahu has crossed the line; instead of salvation I find myself in shackles. I cannot sing a song.)

You have felt the pain, prime minister. You must now give the India we want back to us Indians.

The writer is editor-in-chief of Asian Age, New Delhi.