AS if our country hasn’t had enough of constitutions and constitutional changes, it is set to move towards yet another major constitutional remake. The president said in Quetta last week that the Constitution would be amended before the general election in October and that the main purpose of the constitutional amendments was to establish the National Security Council and “balance the power” between the president and the prime minister.

This constitutional remake will be different from others in the past in that it is going to institutionalize, for the first time in the nation’s history, the role of the military in national affairs at Islamabad. Although the details have yet to emerge, it is quite clear that the military’s role is going to be institutionalized through the establishment of the above supra- national body whose members would include the top military leaders.

In line with this development, it is no coincidence that for the first time in the nation’s history, the office of the chief of staff of the armed forces has been officially spoken of as being one of the three power brokers in the country. President Gen Musharraf himself had said this during his televised address to the nation on April 5 in which he unveiled his referendum plan.

Pakistan’s political history since its creation can perhaps be best described as the breaking and remaking of constitutions. The military leaders who took over power in Islamabad had all vowed to restore democracy but they all had their own version of the kind of “democracy” that would suit the country. Thus, they either promulgated a totally new constitution, which was what president Field Marshal Ayub Khan did, or they amended it in such a way that it took on a whole new character, which president Gen Ziaul Haq did and now President Gen Pervez Musharraf is planning to do.

But history has also shown that the two earlier constitutional remakes eventually failed to last. They were neither initiated by a democratically-elected government nor were they promulgated through a democratically-elected parliament. President Ayub’s 1962 basic democracy constitution collapsed like a house of cards as soon as he was out of power. His immediate successor, Gen Yahya Khan, had to overseer the first-ever general election in the country on the basis of direct adult franchise for 313 National Assembly seats in December 1970 that eventually brought into power the first democratically-elected government.

Gen Zia fared somewhat better than his predecessor. His version of democracy, enshrined in the 1985 Constitutional Eighth Amendment, under which the elected governments could be tamed and brought in line through a much more powerful president empowered to dismiss the directly-elected prime minister at will, lasted nine years after his death. This version of democracy saw three democratically-elected civilian governments dismissed within a decade.

In 1997, however, Gen Zia’s brand of democracy eventually also collapsed when the then elected government in cooperation with the opposition managed to knock down the Eighth Amendment by a two-thirds majority in parliament. In retrospect, it was not surprising that the military would move again after this, and sure enough it did in October 1999.

This time Gen Musharraf is seeking a formal constitutional role for the military in Islamabad through the establishment of the National Security Council. Serious consideration about establishing the NSC goes as far back as Gen Zia’s time, but it is only now that its fruition seems imminent. Other constitutional amendments in the offing are likely to strengthen the powers of the president, who is also supposed to preside over the NSC.

As with the generals who came into power before him, Gen Musharraf is amending the Constitution for this purpose before the general election and transfer of power back to civilian rule. And as with the earlier generals, he has chosen a referendum, instead of election, to entrench himself as the president of the country ahead of the transfer of power to civilian rule.

In voting yes for Gen Musharraf in the referendum on April 30, the people will in essence be voting for a constitutional role of the military in Islamabad. The question is, would Gen Musharraf’s democratic dispensation turn out to be any more permanent than his predecessors’? Can it turn the country’s fortunes around and put it on the path of political stability and on the road to economic development a la the “little tigers” of the East? Or would it eventually become yet another military leader’s failed experiment in democracy? Perhaps only time can tell.

GOING by the outpourings in their respective Sunday columns, two of India’s highly regarded and secular newspaper editors would have us believe that Atal Behari Vajpayee’s communal his real, mild, moderate personality. M.J. Akbar of The Asian Age equates the Indian prime minister with a moderate Jinnah in his early innings with the Congress, who was bludgeoned as it were by his Hindu colleagues into choosing a communal line.

Vir Sanghvi of the Hindustan Times doesn’t quite use the word disillusioned while expressing his sense of betrayal with Vajpayee, but he almost confesses that this is how it is. If we consider the generous views also of President Pervez Musharraf on Vajpayee’s deeper soul, which he curiously seems to be privy to, there should be no ground left for anyone to doubt the basic goodness of the man under discussion.

Vajpayee, they all would suggest, was all for peace with Pakistan, but he was tripped by some hardline, hawkish Hindutva pointman lurking in Agra. General Musharraf suspects that man to be Home Minister Advani. The arguments of all three may yet be true and tenable, except that there are stronger reasons to believe that they are not. And the one cited from a distant archive below is not any less compelling than several other instances that tend to take off the mask from the face of yet another charismatic fascist, as fascists often are.

“Thousands of people are coming form across the border (with Bangladesh), and they are creating problems. If this had happened in the west (Gujarat? Punjab?) they would have been have been cut to pieces.”

These were the words of Vajpayee, the moderate politician, in a communally charged Assam in 1983. Several deputies, including Inderjit Gupta, quoted the famous words later in parliament.

Needless to say the rivers-of-blood speech was followed as it was intended to be by the notorious Nellie massacre in which Hindu youths savagely killed and maimed hundreds of Muslims, mostly women and children.

The picture of rows of small babies lying dead in a pool of blood is still vivid. It was snapped by the intrepid Raghu Rai for India Today magazine’s cover story. Mrs Indira Gandhi, then presiding over the non-aligned summit in Delhi, had the magazine promptly thrown out of the media annexe, because as she said she “did not want my guests to go home disgusted with my country”.

Of course, Vajpayee too had made similar comments when he visited Gujarat recently albeit after a protracted delay, when he wondered aloud before fawning newsmen: “With what face will I now go abroad?” But abroad he did go. And he was seen smiling, chatting, chirping about foreign investments in Singapore.

He even uncharacteristically wore pants for a relaxed stroll across the sprawling Angkor Watt in Cambodia. But when he returned home he wasted no time in letting loose a volley of fiendish thoughts about the essentially violent nature of Muslims and so on.

Like a good member of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh that he is, he delved at length on the tragedy in which Hindu activists were killed at Godhra but had no words to comfort the hundreds killed, raped, tortured, terrorized and rendered homeless by his supporters in Gujarat, a state described by his party as a laboratory for a future Hindu Rashtra. He had not a kind word to speak about the thousands of helpless, marooned and wrecked Muslims, all crammed like the living-dead in Auschwitz-like camps in Ahmedabad where noble-hearted helpers remain too terrorized to help and those who do step in risk their lives and limbs.

Shortly before he spoke at the Goa convention of the country’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, the prime minister’s office took good care to deny a story in The Times of India that he was planning to get Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi sacked.

Instead what we heard was a clarion call for elections, literally over the dead bodies of the victims of an orchestrated pogrom, of systematic and organized brutality that still shows no sign of exhausting its venom after more than 40 days of a relentless reign of terror.

So it was surprising to read M.J. Akbar spitting fire at Sonia Gandhi and not at Vajpayee. It was surprising too to know that Vir Sanghvi was at some stage of his professional prime so enamoured of Vajpayee that he had declared him to be perfect prime minister material. All in the full knowledge that Vajpayee was a creature of the RSS first and every other facet of his personality was secondary? Vajpayee has often enough said so himself.

And what are we to make of his unabated militarism right from the day when he thundered about India’s nuclear prowess? Do we need an opinion poll to find out that Indians are feeling far less secure today than they did before the advent of Vajpayee and his militarist doctrine?

Day in and day out we are told through a completely docile, unquestioning and cleverly selected bunch of journalists and analysts about how we can now annihilate Pakistan and how we are a regional superpower. Perhaps all that is true. Anyone struck by a nuclear bomb would be annihilated.

But which superpower with all their nuclear arsenal was ever respected by any one country whose opinion counted? Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka — where is India respected? In Bhutan? Let’s change the subject lest we offend fragile foreign office sensibilities.

Sanghvi speaks of how for years he was tormented by his friends about his early aversion to the BJP, until something changed six years ago.

“I was never really convinced by all this but in 1996, when A. B. Vajpayee ran a 13-day-government, I was so impressed by his speech during the confidence motion that I wrote a column entitled Prime Ministerial Material, arguing that Vajpayee would stand head and shoulders over anybody that the United Front would appoint instead,” Sanghvi, seen as usually soft on the Congress, says. So it took him five years of BJP rule to write this epitaph to Vajpayee’s secular politics?

“No Muslim in Gujarat has any faith in the state government,” he wrote insightfully on Sunday. “Muslims all over India fear that POTA will be used selectively against them. We’ve already seen the first symptoms in Gujarat: all those arrested under POTA were Muslims. And as for fears of unfair treatment, you need look no further than Narendra Modi. Families of the victims of the Godhra massacre (all Hindus) were to get Rs2 lakh compensation while those killed in the riots (mainly Muslims) were worth half that amount.” May Sanghvi never waver from his disillusionment with Vajpayee.

But what has happened with Akbar? He speaks about Sonia Gandhi’s accented English and Hindi to berate her. And he rests his case against Sonia Gandhi over her Italian origins. Is this not a variant of fundamentalism? How is Sonia Gandhi’s accent any worse than the indescribably atrocious diction of a Sanjeeva Reddy, a Zail Singh, a Deve Gowda?

Is her Hindi any worse than Benazir Bhutto’s Urdu? Certainly not. Moreover, if as he says Narasimha Rao and Atal Behari Vajpayee were all such great communicators, how come they never called a single press conference in Delhi? A proper news conference, not the hole and corner ones given to captive (or captivated) journalists.

Surely Akbar is aware of all this.

There are those within the communist fold and other secular formations who may have no love lost for the Congress Party, but who would still swear by what they have seen in Amethi, where there are few who could challenge Sonia Gandhi’s complete authority over her constituency — not in crass electoral terms, but in terms of knowing a few hundred if not many more of her rural supporters, women and children, by their first names.

A pilot is rated by the number of hours he has spent airborne in the cockpit.

At the risk of sounding a bit maudlin, I would say that if we go by the numbers of days Sonia Gandhi has spent in Amethi, living with the village folk, sharing their meals and organizing their womenfolk into empowered groups during Rajiv Gandhi’s tenure alone, she would easily surpass the average time spent by most of her Lok Sabha colleagues in the middle of India’s nowhere villages.

In fact I would say this whole Indian versus foreigner argument pales into insignificance if you consider the fact that Ken Zuckerman plays the sarod better than Ashish Khan, the son of the one and only Ali Akbar Khan. Try them out and see for yourself. Or to use another analogy, if the Belgian economist Jean Dreze can provide truer and first-hand insights into the deprivations of Bolangir or Kalahandi, should he be trusted less than Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha, simply because they are different nationalities?

Arguing that any other Congress leader, whether Manmohan Singh or Digvijay Singh or P.V. Narasimha Rao, would be acceptable as a future prime minister, but not Sonia Gandhi, Akbar gives strange reasons, strange because they come from him.

“Because she is not of Indian origin,” he declares. “She is an Italian. A passport, acquired fairly late in life, and much after it could have been done, does not make you an Indian. Her daughter Priyanka is an Indian, but not Sonia. Each time both speak they prove this.. One dreads the thought of her becoming conversational in Hindi; mispronunciation can lead to very dangerous self-parody.”

Well, well, well. Remember Mr Chandrashekhar, Mr Akbar? And Jagjivan Ram or Ram Vilas Paswan, or Sitaram Kesri? Shall we disqualify Laloo Yadav?

It would be a sad day indeed if Akbar’s predictions, as they often do, come true — that Indians would rather be ruled by a homegrown Mussolini than an Italian-born democrat, simply because the democrat had a faltering speech and had failed the DNA test to qualify her as a bona fide Indian.

DNA test, passport, accented English? Imagine all these as explanations should fascism prevail in India.

Then it should be equally true that Sonia Gandhi, debunked on the one hand as a rank outsider in the equation between democracy and fascism, should be handed the blame for any adverse turn of events? Whatever be the merit of these arguments, the only reason I can see why Sonia Gandhi does not pass the stringent test of leading India is that her party has become too used to exploiting communalism, and has very little left of its old fire, far less any ideology, to take on the BJP juggernaut frontally.

COMMENTING on President Gen Pervez Musharraf’s addresses in Thatta, Sindhu writes that when he announced he would have his first public meeting in Sindh at the tail-end area of the province, it was hoped that his advisers would brief him on the destruction caused by the severe water crisis in the region and he would say something to console its populace. However, due to the courtesy of his advisers, the president just ignored this hottest problem of Sindh and insisted that water shortage was natural. Even he was made to say that Sindh had been provided with additional 5,000 cusecs, a claim which has been denied by the officials of the Indus River System Authority.

Earlier when Gen Musharraf addressed the Lahore rally, he assured Punjab that work would continue on the greater Thal canal, the project which has been a source of a controversy for the last one-and-a-half centuries and has now become synonym with the destruction of Sindh. It was hoped that when he comes to Sindh, he would assure its water-starved people that they would get their due share of water. But instead they had to listen to the same talk of the construction of new dams and canals on the River Indus which they had been hearing from Wapda and rejecting for so long. At this critical juncture, any proposal of dam building is equal to adding insult to injury of Sindh, that has been caused by the beginning of the construction of the disputed Thal canal.

The general has termed Pakistan the mother of its four provinces. Does a mother provide milk to a son while depriving the other of even water and leaving him to die of thirst? For Gen Musharraf this is high time to win hearts of the people of Sindh but the prevailing conditions in the province have linked it with the problem of the availability of water. If the president really wants the support of the people of Sindh, he should provide them their due share of water and shelve projects like the Thal canal, which is just unacceptable for the lower riparians. Only then he can be sure of a big turnout of the voters of rural Sindh in the presidential referendum.

Ibrat points out that Gen Musharraf has been criticizing the former rulers for the contradiction in their words and deeds but his government also seems to be leading the same way. On the one hand, the president says that nobody would be allowed to usurp Sindh’s rights and on the other this practice continues. The biggest example of this is the denial of water to Sindh. Despite the direction of the president’s secretariat, Punjab rejected Sindh’s objections at the recent meeting of Irsa which consequently announced it would keep on the water sharing under the 1994 ministerial decision for a month. Thus Sindh’s just objections and protest have once again gone unheeded. Similarly Punjab is also insisting on filling the Mangla Dam while Sindh is also inching towards the shortage of even drinking water. Is this situation not similar to the one which prevailed under the former governments which used to say one thing and do quite the other.

Kawish deplores that as a judicial inquiry was ordered into the death of an under-trial prisoner, Mehmood Khoso, due to the torture by the Hyderabad Central Jail authorities, a 16-year-old inmate of Larkana jail was paralysed in the torture by the prison staff. More shocking is the fact that the UTP, Sajjad Bozdar, was tortured to force him to confess to a murder. Doctors at the Chandka Medical College Hospital say that the youth has torture marks on his head and eye and electrocution marks on his feet and that the lower part of his body has been paralysed since he was thrown upon some hard place. The jail officials claim that Bozdar tried to commit suicide by jumping from the roof of a prison building. If this is true the prison officials should have admitted him to a hospital which they did not and the matter was exposed when, after almost a week, a local court, on the application of the prisoner’s relatives, issued an ordered for providing him medical treatment. The torture of inmates by prison officials should be stopped and as a first step in this direction those responsible for crippling the youth should be suspended and if they are found guilty in an judicial inquiry, they should be punished according to the criminal laws so that their example deters others from torturing hapless prisoners.

Awami Awaz writes that Sindh is burning in the fire of lawlessness and every other day the news about a tribal clash shocks the readers. The factors behind this fratricide include the weakness of the police, apathy of the tribal lords and absence or low quality of education. Unless these obstacles are overcome, the situation will not improve and ignorant people will keep on shedding blood on the slightest pretext.