Still no light at the end of the tunnel

ALL sorts of coalition combinations have been hinted at or suggested during the past politically hectic month since the Oct 10 election. These range from a national consensus government of the PML-Q, the MMA and the PPP to a government of the PPP and the MMA, a government of the PPP and the PML-Q and, most recently, a government of the PML-Q and the MMA.

Strangely enough one month after the election, it is still unclear (at the time of writing at least) which combination will eventually form the government. Whichever combination it will be, it will be one in which consensus will have been reached by the coalition partners on acceptance of some of the contentious issues under the LFO. The threat of either another martial law or re-election has already been floated to compel the parties to fall in line so that the National Assembly can meet for its first session as soon as possible and the new government start functioning.

Forming a government would not have been such a tedious and torturous job that it has turned out to be had the majority of political parties and politicians, if not all of them, been united on a single platform rejecting the continuation and perpetuation of military rule as is being provided for under the LFO. As politicians, they are expected to fight for the sovereignty and supremacy of parliament and oppose military rule in any form, whether it be formal and direct like martial law or informal and indirect through institutions like the National Security Council.

But in Pakistan, wrought by frequent martial laws, there are always politicians who are willing to do the military’s bidding in return for a slice of the political cake. This time round, it is the PML-Q, members of whom have had no qualms about voicing their unstinted support for the LFO. In fact, it achieved the success that it did in last month’s elections based on this manifesto.

However, greater success was achieved by the other two major parties combined, viz. the PPP and the MMA, which were elected under the anti-LFO manifesto. But as the weeks went by and political consultations on government formation intensified, it became increasingly unclear where exactly these two parties stood with regards to the LFO.

If either the PPP or the MMA or both are now willing to join the PML-Q to form a coalition government, their voters would want to be reassured on whether their parties are going to compromise on the basic premise of military rule in their negotiations with the PML-Q and the military. Questions that voters will automatically ask are: what are the points in their manifestos that the PPP and the MMA are willing to compromise on with the PML-Q and the military? What are the principles that they would not give up on? And what is it exactly that they are negotiating for in return for joining in a coalition government under a military president?

Are the PPP and the MMA coming closer to accepting the PML-Q’s election manifestos in return for short-term personal gains like the write-off of current cases against their leaders, freedom of jailed member-politicians, guarantees that the NAB would not touch other members, and the prize of top government slots like the prime ministership and other ministerial positions? Is this what is meant when politicians say they believe in the formation of a consensus government for the sake of national interests?

If so, voters cannot help but feel that they have been used to help these parties achieve their own personal ends. They might as well have voted for the PML-Q or for no party at all if they had known that the party they voted for would make an about-turn in their manifestos after the election.

If this is the political picture emerging, then it really doesn’t matter for the voters who will be the prime minister, whether it be Zafarullah Jamali, Makhdoom Amin Fahim, Maulana Fazlur Rahman or for that matter Zubeida Jalal. What they do know is that for the politicians and their political parties, voters and the people are their least concern, particularly after the election. What matters only is the powers that be, viz. the military and America.

For the PPP and the MMA to retain credibility with their voters, they will need to negotiate for some kind of face-saving exit for the military from the political scene, before either the PPP or the MMA or both decide to join in a coalition government with the PML-Q. Unless, of course, they manage to convert the PML-Q on the LFO.

As much as the politicians may wish the LFO did not exist, there is no escaping the fact that the new National Assembly — whenever and if it comes into session — will have a crucial black or white decision to make that will determine the subsequent course of the nation’s political history: whether it wants a perpetual military rule (which will remain a direct one so long as the president is a military leader) or a civilian government with parliamentary sovereignty.

The National Assembly will be deciding for the former choice if it passes the LFO with a two-thirds majority, and the latter choice if it rejects the LFO with a two-thirds majority. In either case, the country will be in for more politically tumultuous times.

A National Assembly vote for the perpetuation of military rule with the establishment of the National Security Council as provided under the LFO can hardly be expected to put to rest the political resistance against such a military role in the country. And if the National Assembly votes to reject the LFO, the president can be expected to dissolve parliament once again, bringing the country back to exactly where it was three years ago.

Century-old school near collapse

OVER a century-old building of the Government Sadiq Girls High School has been converted into a ruin due to the negligence of the Education Department. Although declared dangerous in 1997 by the Buildings department, the teachers and students are compelled to risk their lives in almost the rundown classrooms.

Built in 1863 as a state minister’s residence, the first ever girls school during the defunct state period was shifted in this building in 1938 by the late Amir of Bahawalpur. It consisted of 16-room block which is now in a state of disrepair.

Cracks have appeared in the walls of most of the classrooms while the roofs leak profusely during the rainy days. The block was declared dangerous in the teeth of a limited repair and renovation work undertaken during the past years.

In the recent past, the government chalked out a comprehensive plan to reconstruct the school building with an expenditure of Rs30 million. It was proposed to preserve the building’s outer and front elevations, being the cultural heritage of former state’s school. But neither the plan was approved nor the government sanctioned the required funds for its reconstruction.

However, some of the classes were accommodated in the second block while the primary section classes are without classrooms and their students sit in the open and brave the vagaries of the weather.

The Punjab government had sanctioned only Rs0.5 million for its repair during the last fiscal year. Even this meagre amount could not be utilized and was lapsed owing to infighting among officials of Buildings and Education departments.

At present, the strength of girl students and teachers is 1,300 and 50, respectively. Moreover, girls from other areas of former Bahawalpur division continue to visit the city for sport and other extra-curricular activities. These students are provided hostel accommodation in the second block where they face problems due to the shortage of latrines.

Local education circles have called upon the government to provide funds for the repair and rehabilitation of the dilapidated block of the school so that the lives of students and teachers could be protected.

CONSUMERS were disappointed by Wapda chairman Lt-Gen Zulfiqar Ali Khan (retired) at his open kutchery held here during the last week.

Two consumers levelled corruption charges against Mepco officials, including an SDO and a metre reader, but the chairman neither ordered any probe against them nor suspended either of them.

An old man brought to the notice of the chairman that he was served with power bill amounting to Rs21,000. He said when he approached the official concerned, he allegedly demanded illegal gratification from him. Ignoring complainant’s charges, the chairman only granted him concession of instalments for the payment of the bill.

Another complainant levelled corruption charges against a metre reader who allegedly received Rs2,000 from him. This complaint also fell prey to its traditional reply when the chairman remarked humorously that nobody had ever offered him money.

Most of the complaints were regarding the delay in providing new electricity connections.

AT A SEMINAR, the progressive farmers were exhorted to use modern methods of cultivation supplemented with fertilizers.

Speakers, including FFC regional manager Sohail Kiyani, technical services chiefs Attiqur Rehman and Waqar Abbas, urged the cultivators to play their role in achieving self-sufficiency in food and seek guidance from agriculture experts.

When the press in Delhi encounters the brown fog of a winter dawn

A TV discussion over fake police encounters saw former law minister Arun Jaitley flare up against the ubiquitous anti- national journalists who he said criticized the country’s honest- to-god, dedicated bunch of policemen. He warned that such dangerous tripe was finding its way to the pages of Dawn too! What Mr Jaitley implied was that the “the enemy” is watching, so don’t you wash too much of your linen in public.

At which point India’s veteran human rights activist Ravi Nair intervened to state that South China Morning Post and several American newspapers had carried similar stories about the so- called encounter at Delhi’s Ansal Plaza and that Mr Jaitley was only revealing his “prejudiced mentality” by picking on a Pakistani newspaper.

As irony would have it, Pakistan’s acting high commissioner Jaleel Abbas Jilani had returned that very morning from the foreign ministry office where he had cited Indian newspapers, and not any intelligence briefings, as his source to assert that the two men killed in the basement of the shopping complex on November 3 may have been drugged and killed in a fake encounter. Mr Gilani insisted the two were not Pakistani nationals.

Whatever be the merits of the case, we should be thankful to someone called Dr Hari Krishna who, by claiming to have witnessed the killing of the two men, has successfully triggered a huge debate if nothing else, about the mystifying incident on Diwali eve.

Now, for all you know, Dr Krishna could be an ISI plant, as claimed by some Indians or an Indian intelligence ploy to lampoon alternate, unbridled thinking. Or he could be a genuine eyewitness to a criminal assault by the state on innocent men. Or he could be a simple fraud who is basking in the blaze of national attention.

And yet whatever else Dr Hari Krishna may or may not be, he has at least become a catalyst to a debate, a public debate about an issue that India needs to tackle and which had once actually interested the likes of Mr Jaitley and even more so his ideological guru Arun Shourie, a minister with several important portfolios and a former champion of civil liberties.

For a quick recall, not too long ago Mr Jaitley and Mr Shourie were both mouthing the same slogans for civil liberties, the slogans they deride today. This was when Indira Gandhi had clamped her notorious Emergency rule on India. Both, Mr Jaitley, the lawyer-turned-politician and Mr Shourie, the journalist- turned-minister had fought hard against the mutilation of the Indian Constitution.

So why do they sing a different tune today? Had the two merely cynically used the platform of the People’s Union of Civil Liberties (PUCL) to advance their hitherto secret and sectarian agenda rooted in religious bigotry or are they plain and simple turncoats, mere opportunists who never were interested in the mumbo-jumbo of democracy.

It is nobody’s case that what happened in the basement of Ansal Plaza on the night before Diwali, the festival of lights, was cooked up or stage-managed. Nor is anyone ruling out the possibility that this could be true. But nobody other than Dr Krishna is saying anything assertively. Because no one else claims to have seen it all the way Dr Krishna describes it.

However, given the history of the errant police forces in the country, yes, given the history of encounter deaths across this country for years, nay decades, people are asking the most obvious questions that come to everyone’s minds. After all there was a major faux pas in the Chhittisinghpura massacre. Was there not, where innocent men were killed as militants in Kashmir?

So was it a genuine encounter between an alert police force and two heavily armed terrorists from Pakistan who had come to trigger communal trouble on Diwali or was it a fake fiddle with some political agenda which is not beyond the ken of this government, as claimed by many others?

That is the question. To jog our memory about where the Bharatiya Janata Party’s main spokesmen, its public face, stood on these issues not too long ago, we have to look at the brief history of this practice of encounters. Let us take Andhra Pradesh where Mr Shourie was involved with the PUCL’s campaign in the Congress- ruled state, where encounters were common, mainly involving the Naxalites, usually low-caste leftist guerillas.

For whatever reasons a recent PUCL document continues to laud Mr Shourie’s contributions to its struggles in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. It says: “As a part of the general criticism of authoritarian governance during Emergency, this practice of encounters got highlighted, particularly in the context of the pronounced opposition of Lok Nayak Jayaprakash Narayan to the execution of unlawful orders by officials.

“He appointed a Committee headed by Shri Justice V. M. Tarkunde consisting, among others, of Mr Arun Shourie, Mr K. G. Kannabiran who functioned as the secretary of the committee,” the document recalls. The reports of the committee have been published by Mr Shourie in his book — Institutions in the Janata Phase 1980.

“The investigations by the Tarkunde Committee led to the appointment of a one-person commission of inquiry under the 1956 Act, in the year 1978, by the Andhra Pradesh Government, with Mr Justice V. Bhargava to enquire into these killings.”

Though the interest in democratic governance waned subsequently, the courts evinced interest in people’s rights and constitutional norms and that remains the case even today. Why did the interest wane in human rights and democratic governance and why? Why do Mr Jaitley and Mr Shourie speak the same language today: Get a whole jaw for a tooth?

The language that Mr Jaitley speaks is the language of an intolerant man who does not want to hear anything that is not in harmony with his prejudices.

As spokesman for the troubled BJP, which is falling apart with rebellions and endless electoral losses, one can make allowances for a shade of anger in his tone.

But when it comes to the lives of fellow human beings being put to sword, it doesn’t matter whose life — Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Dalit — personal predilections cannot be allowed to become policy.

Everyone, including the largely secular press, has been talking of the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat. They have been talking of how the BJP has used the tribal people of Gujarat to target Muslims. They have given eyewitness accounts of rapes, arson, murders, lynchings.

Mr Jaitley and before him the other BJP spokesmen and spokeswomen were quick to respond to these questions with a standard answer: “Secularists are ignoring what happened in Godhra. They are only talking about the suffering of Muslims.”

Another specious argument, the one doing the rounds most during the election campaign now under way in that hapless state, is that Muslims sympathize with Pakistan and they harbour ISI agents.

The unspoken explanation is there for everyone to grasp. Violence is inevitable. We are helpless, you see. The mischief began from the other side, after all. And then the whole thing gets linked up with the easy catch-all of Islamic terrorism.

Let us, therefore, cite another PUCL document, the same PUCL that Mr Shourie once worked with and which helped him earn a fair name for himself. This PUCL appeal is dated August 2000, approximately a year before the Indian government thought it fit to invite President Pervez Musharraf to Agra. Things were that normal. Or so it seemed.

But there’s a catch here. So what if there was no Godhra to spark communal violence, there was an attack elsewhere, in far-away Kashmir. It doesn’t matter who attacked the Hindu pilgrims and with what motive. Just lay into the Muslims wherever you find them. That seems to be the BJP’s motto.

“After the Gujarat Bandh enforced by the VHP and Sangh Parivar to condemn the killings of Amarnath pilgrims in Kashmir, many parts of Gujarat witnessed communal violence and gruesome attack on minorities during the past week,” the August 2000 PUCL appeal says.

“While the tension still continues in some of these parts of the tribal belt, the Sangh Parivar’s most violent outfit Bajrang Dal is out to escalate communal violence in Meghraj, a small taluka town of Sabarkantha.

“Bajrang Dal has announced a Hindutva convention on Monday in Meghraj at Pahadiya Hanuman temple. According to a news report published in the Ahmedabad-based daily Gujarat Today (Aug 10), Bajrang Dal plans to mobilize over 30,000 tribals and its supporters from Gujarat for this convention. At the local level there is reasonable fear that this convention will whip communal tension and boost attack on minorities in Meghraj.

“The existing class contradictions between Muslim merchants and tribals are likely to be successfully converted into communal hatred against the community by the Sangh Parivar, eying upon the forthcoming municipal and Panchayat elections in the state.

“We are sure that the government and the police will be mute spectators to this event of mobilizing tribals to launch a bloody pogrom against the minorities, as is borne out from past experiences in the Dangs, Ahmedabad and elsewhere.

“Hoping that sufficient international public pressure on the Indian and Gujarat government might yield some positive results, we appeal to all progressive secular and democratic forces to condemn this Hindutva convention and pressurize the government to take preventive action or ban the convention (of Monday) and save the tribal Meghraj town from burning in communal flames.”

Prescient. But needless to say the PUCL appeal was never heeded although Mr Jaitley may hold the Gujarat Today as more culpable for alerting us about the arriving trouble than the saffron hoodlums he likes to defend. That seems to be a straightforward strategy. Pillory the press. It works most of the time. The only problem in this approach is that if the press loses its credibility by toeing Mr Jaitley’s line, he may have nothing left to quote from.

For wasn’t Prime Minister Vajpayee himself citing passages from a Dawn column by a Pakistani journalist to defend himself from the slings and arrows of the opposition in parliament, after the Agra fiasco?

Waiting for democracy

KAWISH writes that the failure of the three major political parties to reconcile with each other is a factor contributing towards delay in the formation of a new government. However, another aspect of this impasse cannot be ignored. That is, the demand of the People’s Party Parliamentarians and the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal to abolish the Legal Framework Order. They are of the view that there is no need for the LFO after the election and now the Constitution should be restored, under which the elected representatives should take the oath.

The MMA and the PPP insist that they do not accept Article 58(B) of the Constitution and the National Supreme Council under the LFO. However, the chief of the pro-government Pakistan Muslim League-Q, Chaudhry Shujaat, has told the MMA that the government is not going to abolish the LFO, and advised the religious alliance to adopt an approach of give-and-take on this issue. This suggests that the government is not prepared to withdraw the controversial piece of law, come what may.

This is a very harmful situation. Although the government had held the election under its self-made rules, the mandate given to it by the Supreme Court had expired on Oct 12, and with it the legality of the laws promulgated by it had also expired. Therefore, the parliamentary affairs, from oath-taking to election of the leader of the house, should be conducted under the Constitution. Parliament should have the authority to decide whether the constitutional amendments introduced by the Musharraf government should be continued or not. Similarly, it should also be free to determine the future course of the country. If the government believes that the continuation of its policies would be beneficial for the country, let parliament debate it and make the final decision.

It is just inexplicable why the government is so afraid of the elected representatives. As it had provided the masses with the right to elect their leaders, it should offer freedom to the elected representatives to make decisions on their own. It would be better to convene the session of the National Assembly under 1973 Constitution than to make the assembly members agree to the conditions of the government and thus settle the constitutional disputes outside parliament. This approach makes the government appear it is falling short in its claim to restoration of democracy.

Awami Awaz says that on the one hand the government claims to be neutral regarding the efforts to form a new government and, on the other, it is approaching and influencing different players of this game. For this, it is using the leverage of the offer of freedom to Asif Ali Zardari and withdrawal of accountability cases against some other PPP leaders. The PPP should not get entangled in this trap and it must not compromise on the matters of national interest for the sake of a few individuals.

Tameer-i-Sindh terms the demand by Chaudhry Shujaat for the postponement of the National Assembly session a bad omen for still-to be-born democracy. At least the PML-Q leader should have taken the PPP and the MMA into confidence before presenting the demand. His unilateral demand and its subsequent condemnation by the PPP and the MMA gives the impression of tension among the three major parties, which can be exploited. Politicians in our country have always been blamed for the damage done to democracy. At least, in the present crucial conditions, the politicians should not offer another opportunity to the army in this regard.

Sindhu writes that the wait for election after Oct 10, 1999, has culminated in wait for transfer of power after Oct 10 2002. Apart from the questions about who would be the next prime minister and what has caused delay in the transfer of power, there is a need to think upon the wait of the people for revival of democracy and the expectations they might have with it. In this context, a heavy responsibility lies on the politicians. They should refrain from creating a helpful atmosphere for delay in the transfer of power. Moreover, they should adopt a maturer attitude in the coming assembly to help democracy to take roots.