What will change and how?

THE unprecedented campaign by the lawyers community in defence of the judiciary has spurred hope in the hearts of ordinary women and men across the land and ambition in the hearts of many who wish to be their new masters. Everybody is asking everybody else as to how this struggle will end. Quite a few observers, trying as usual to run ahead of the caravan, cannot hold back their tidings of a new order. What does it mean for the long-suffering majority of the people?

The lawyers have jealously protected, and done so rightly, their struggle against hijacking by outsiders. They have avoided, again rightly, spelling out the relief they are asking for. Ostensibly they are demanding an end to the Establishment’s expedition against the Chief Justice, in particular, and the institution of the judiciary, in general. The objective is the establishment of an unexceptionable convention that from now on it would not be possible to coax or coerce the judiciary into upholding all and any acts or edicts of holders of power, regardless of the merits of their claim to legitimacy.

However, many among the blackcoats, especially the young ones who have provided the community with the critically needed spine, have set their sights much higher: they wish to see justice established not only in a narrow legal sense but also in broader political and social meanings of the term. It is possible that they have been led into thus defining their goal by reading the minds of the crowds that have greeted them in city after city and who have waited by the roadside for the Chief Justice’s cavalcade for long hours.

There is no doubt that the people no longer have faith in piecemeal justice; they look for deliverance from each and every cause of their suffering. As happens in struggles for national liberation, everybody, the bystander as well as the activist in the thick of battle, defines justice in terms of his/her own needs and aspirations. A complete presentation of their wish-list is perhaps impossible but some of the items on the agenda can be mentioned here.

The change that many have begun to talk about means in the eyes of the masses: government by freely chosen representatives, rule of law, freedom from police (and their fellow travellers’) raj, satisfaction of the tenant’s (especially bonded hari’s) hunger for land, guarantees of gainful employment for everyone and entitlement to decent wages, equal opportunity to women and the poor, provision of facilities for quality education for every child and youth, guarantees of basic rights to life, security and liberty, and the right to provision of water, electricity and gas.

The lawyers’ agitation has certainly contributed to the formulation of the people’s agenda, but an equally important factor is the unusual nature of the coming general election. It is no ordinary election in which the only issue could be the election of a team, old or new, to manage the state within an already settled framework. The stakes in the 2007 general election are much higher. Not only the people of Pakistan but also the entire body of their well-wishers abroad wish this election to mark the country’s transition to democratic governance. In a way this election is comparable to the 1970 polls and the people, including the small and exhausted intelligentsia believe this is the time to decide the fundamental issues, failure to resolve which has pushed Pakistan into one crisis after another.

What this means is that the issue is not merely one of replacing the man at the top or revising the terms of his contract, the essential issue is division of powers among the three organs of the state recognised in the democratic world and guarding the people’s sovereign rights against encroachment by any party. And since what has been said above amounts to a systemic change and a restructuring of the state, the people have every right to put forward their views on the direction and substance of the state’s agenda.

Quite a few people want the lawyers to take up the people’s agenda and put their political and socio-economic demands up front, otherwise the public support for them will remain unreciprocated. This demand appears to be patently unfair. The question of reciprocity does not arise. The fight for the independence of the judiciary is not a matter of exclusive concern of lawyers, who may appear to be fighting for their group interest but are in reality fighting for the basic rights of the whole population of the country.

Besides, the lawyers have already done more than what was expected of them. They have shown the way to overcoming the fear of a seemingly immovable and invincible authority. They have demonstrated the possibilities of mobilising a sizeable force on the basis of principles of justice without exploiting any community’s behalf, and they have foiled attempts to frighten them through police violence and waves of arbitrary arrest and detention. They can rightly say that they have opened the floodgates of change but the floodwaters are not subject to their control.

The sort of change the people have set their hearts on will not come about until the masses in huge numbers, not in thousands but in hundreds of thousands, resolve to pull down the walls the vested interests have raised between them and the seat of power. The lawyers cannot mobilise such a force. That can only be done by political parties.

Unfortunately, the political parties, at least most of them, have successfully knocked themselves out of reckoning and any reference to them in a political discussion is sometimes greeted with howls of protest. It is time such cynical dismissal of political parties was given up. For one thing, there is no alternative engine of political change. For another, a discussion on the political parties’ past is bound to get bogged down in a barren debate as to who caused greater harm to Pakistan – the so-called civilian political governments or the military-led political regimes. Above all, the people should accept some responsibility for letting the political parties make a mess of their mandate. The moment is quite favourable for any political party that sincerely wants to win the hearts and minds of the masses and is committed to the pursuit of power solely on the strength of public backing.

Although the time to the general election may not appear sufficient to allow for broad-based parties’ rebirth, in situations such as now obtaining in the country, even a small investment in the people’s political education and mobilisation will pay high dividends. What is required is that instead of talking only among themselves and basing decisions on each other’s ignorance of reality or on their expectations of accommodation with the regime in power, the party leaderships should engage themselves in a sustained and comprehensive dialogue with the people to ascertain their views on what they are prepared to yield to the state and what the state must guarantee them as part of its contract with them.

The factors that prevent political parties from spelling out their goals and policies are known. Pakistan is now a totally fractured society, thanks to successive spells of authoritarian rule, and it is not easy to draw up propositions that are equally acceptable to all parts of the country and to all communities and groups living in different regions, even in different parts of a region. But if the task is difficult today it may be impossible tomorrow. The political parties should grow out of the habit of seeking rewards without sweating for them. They will win half of their battles the moment their programmes and pledges are brought into harmony with the fair demands of the people.

It may be necessary to point out that the political parties’ failure to move forward without an understanding with the masses will cost them and the country dear. They will lose whatever bargaining power vis-à-vis the Establishment circumstances have thrown their way. Once again they will be held responsible for missing the moment of change as visualised by the citizens of Pakistan. All those in a position to help the political parties rise to the occasion must also bear in mind the consequences if the people are again cheated out of the reward for their sacrifices. They deserve better than what they have traditionally received at the end of Pakistan’s periodical upheavals, and what Faiz had lamented in the troubled March of 1977:

‘Hum keh hain kub say dar-i-ummed kay daryuza-gar
Yeh ghari guzri tau phir dast-i-talab phailain gay
Kucha-o-bazar say phir chun kay raiza raiza khwab
Hum yunhi pehlay ki soorat jornay lug = jaingay’.

(In free translation the poet says: ‘We are a horde of beggars that has been held for long at the gate of hope. Once this moment has passed, we will again raise our hands in supplication. After collecting the bits and pieces of our dreams from streets and boulevards, we will start reconstructing them as before’.)

Blair’s bizarre departure

THE moment has been anticipated so long, it's easy to lose sight of its strangeness. The handover at Downing Street was formally promised six weeks ago, trailed last September and implied two years before that, when Tony Blair first announced that he would not fight a fourth election.

This has been a slow-motion transition, three years in the making. Even longer, if you buy the Granita legend, which holds that the baton that passes on Wednesday first left Blair's hand over an Islington dinner table in 1994.

We've had so much time to accustom ourselves to it that when the change comes, it will seem entirely normal. Yet it is anything but. Both the departure of Tony Blair and the arrival of Gordon Brown are events with no comparable precedent.

Start with the man who bids farewell. Those who saw the Channel 4 retrospective, The Rise and Fall of Tony Blair, will have marvelled at the near-consensus, even among Blair's closest colleagues and supporters, that his reputation is for ever tainted by the invasion of 2003. Margaret Jay ruefully reflected that all Blair's considerable achievements would be "terribly undermined, and probably fatally undermined, by what I think of as the tragedy of going into Iraq".

Neither she nor the others interviewed are slogan-shouting members of the Stop the War Coalition, waving their "Bliar" placards. Yet even they can see no shelter from this glowering cloud, believing it will cast gloom over Blair for evermore. Which only makes Wednesday's graceful exit so puzzling.

For Tony Blair will leave today not with his head bowed, or drummed out of office, but on a day and in a manner of his choosing. He has choreographed his exit with a thousand send-offs: cheers at Sedgefield, a last hug at the White House, a final round of backslapping from European leaders last week and yet another ovation from a Labour conference on Sunday. No hint of a leader made to dip his head for a fateful, lethal mistake.

Is there a precedent for this? Anthony Eden erred mightily over Suez in 1956 – until Iraq, the byword for a foreign policy calamity. Britain lost an estimated 56 soldiers in that conflict, from an overall death toll of 900. Eden's reputation and his health were shattered by Suez, and he was forced out of Downing Street by the first month of 1957.

Lyndon Johnson had recorded mighty achievements with his Great Society assault on poverty and his civil rights legislation. Yet all that was overwhelmed by his escalation of the Vietnam war. As he sat in the Oval Office at the end of 1968, the United States had lost 30,000 men in battle; eventually that figure would exceed 58,000, alongside the estimated five million Vietnamese dead. At the first sign of a serious political challenge within his own Democratic party, Johnson announced he would not seek re-election, instead retreating from public life in 1969 and dying just four years later. Vietnam had broken him.

The Lebanon war of 1982 had a similar effect on Menachem Begin. Taunted by anti-war protesters, as LBJ had been, Begin grew ever more depressed, quitting a year after the disastrous invasion. He was said to be particularly haunted by the loss of more than 600 Israeli servicemen in a war that also claimed the lives of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians. After his resignation he became a virtual recluse, rarely leaving his apartment until his death in 1992.

There is a pattern here, and Blair does not fit it. Each of these men understood that they had made grievous errors that had cost very many human lives, especially the lives of their own young men and women in uniform. That realisation weighed heavily on them, sending them into a kind of penitential, self-imposed exile. Anthony Eden did not spend his final weeks on a farewell tour, squeezing out one last round of applause. Lyndon Johnson did not angle for another big, international job. Menachem Begin did not insist on going "with the crowds wanting more". They all had the decency to withdraw from office quietly, carrying a heavy burden of guilt on their shoulders.

I have written before that it is an indictment of our system of government that Tony Blair was able to remain in office despite Iraq. Even if he was not culpable of deception, as he insists he was not, even if he only ever did what he thought was right, he was guilty of the grossest misjudgment – one that has led to the deaths of at least 118 British service personnel, along with as many as 655,000 Iraqis.

For that mistake alone, even if it was an honest one, he should have paid with his job. It is a badge of shame for the parliamentary Labour party and the cabinet (and indeed his successor), who between them could have driven Blair from office, that they did not do so earlier. But it also reflects a moral failure by Blair that he leaves today believing himself to be a star, going out on a high.

His expected appointment as the Middle East envoy of the international community suggests he's pulled it off, winning instant rehabilitation, at least from the club of world leaders. The likeliest outcome is that he will not succeed in the job, if only because the circumstances are so utterly unconducive to progress. Indeed, the role could be a painful reminder of the most unhappy aspects of his premiership, as he encounters Arab suspicion that he is merely a lackey of George Bush, and Arab anger over Iraq and the Lebanon war of 2006.

If he was to defy those odds, and achieve success, providing the dogged, daily application of pressure and pursuit of detail that the Israel-Palestine conflict requires (and which he demonstrated in Northern Ireland), then he will deserve enormous credit. Indeed, he will have gone a large way towards redeeming his reputation. Maybe that's why he's so keen to do it.

But Blair's elegant exit will not be today's only novelty. Brown will also make some history. F Scott Fitzgerald once quipped that "there are no second acts in American lives", and the same could be said of British politics, traditionally inhospitable to the second chance. Yet today sees Gordon Brown grab the mother of second chances - if it isn't a third, fourth or fifth chance.

Some hardcore Blairites believe Brown's real moment was in 1992, when he should have challenged John Smith for the leadership. That was his opportunity, they say, and he blew it. He fumbled it again in 1994, making way for Blair. You could easily add the spring of 2004, when Blair reached his lowest ebb and was ripe for ousting. Or last September, when Brown could have turned a minor revolt into a full-blown coup.

Yet Brown missed all those chances – and he has succeeded anyway. It's hard to think of an equivalent achievement: it is as if Michael Portillo was about to step into Downing Street. What's more, and for a decade, Brown has seen off a series of talked-up rivals. Jack Straw, David Blunkett, Charles Clarke, Alan Milburn, David Miliband – all of them were, at some point, pushed as alternatives to Gordon. He saw each of them off, holding on to the most unstable title in politics – heir apparent – for a full 13 years.

So, when the two remarkable men see the Queen, each will be staging something of a political first. Brown will arrive in office as a man determined, he says, to show no pride - and Blair will leave it just as determined to show no shame. ––The Guardian, London

Institutions, not individuals

THOUGH it has become proverbial to say that Pakistan is passing through difficult times, it may not be an exaggeration to claim that not since 1971 has the federation been exposed to such multi-dimensional crises as we find it today. The current turmoil, erupting as a consequence of the sacking of the Chief Justice by General Musharraf, has resulted in political dynamics that could become an agent for redefining state structures in Pakistan.

It may be of some interest to analyse these dynamics and to examine why our leadership has always sparked one crisis or the other at a time when the country was in a state of stable equilibrium with democratic institutions functioning smoothly. This has invariably happened when individuals have tried to undermine important organs of the state.

Mr Bhutto had successfully and ingeniously handled the problems arising out of the secession of East Pakistan. From a position of weakness, he struck a respectable deal with the hawkish Indira Gandhi and secured the release of 90,000 prisoners of war besides retrieving chunks of our territory annexed by the Indian army in West Pakistan.

He masterminded the formal recognition of Bangladesh in a brilliant feat of diplomacy, using the umbrella of the Islamic summit in Lahore.

The nation was made to swallow the bitter pill in the midst of the euphoria created by the presence of such luminaries of the Muslim world as King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, Boumedienne of Algeria, the Qadhafi of Libya and Yasser Arafat of Palestine.

Bhutto gave the country a skilfully drafted constitution which had the consensus of almost all leading Pakistani political personalities and which, till date, is considered a sacrosanct document. Without going into the merits and demerits of his socialist agenda, one can give him credit for giving a new direction to the socio-political dynamics of the country.

The truncated Pakistan appeared to be on course to become a democratic country after two successive military regimes.

Then came the 1977 elections. Bhutto was tempted to overreach himself. In a bid to secure overwhelming majority in parliament, he put to doubt the very credibility of the elections which, by all reckoning, he was winning hands down. The agitation that followed against the alleged rigging was soon to become a bloody movement for the enforcement of the Islamic system of state.

By the time the agitation appeared to be subsiding, it was too late for Bhutto. General Zia seized the opportunity to oust him in a coup. Here we had a classic example of a brilliant politician unnecessarily creating a crisis when he and the country had a smooth sailing.

General Zia, who started out as a pariah for the international world, was soon anchored by US President Ronald Reagan following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. So long as he went along with the American agenda, he remained in control.

However, after the rather abrupt and unilateral withdrawal of the Soviet army, General Zia, too, overreached himself by carving out his own ambitious agenda and embarked upon a mission to turn Afghanistan into a client state. To that end, he started meddling with its ethno-tribal and political structures and unleashed the dynamics which have resulted in its prolonged destabilisation and the resultant fallout for Pakistan.

Prime Minister Muhammad Khan Junejo, displaying better political sagacity, convened an all-parties’ conference which endorsed a non-interventionist policy in the power struggle in the post Soviet-Afghan war scenario. This did not suit General Zia.

This, along with Junejo’s decision to take to task those responsible for the Ojhri camp disaster, led to the sacking of his government. Here again personal whims took precedence over institutionalised decision-making. Zia did not survive for long after this ill-conceived decision. By the time of his death, he had become a spent force with little legitimacy.

The period from 1988 to 1999 was an era that saw the confrontational policies of the PPP and PML, coupled with behind the scenes manoeuvring by the power-wielding establishment, and undemocratic predilections of successive presidents of Pakistan determined the political dispensation. This individualistic approach slowed down the growth of healthy democratic traditions.

The sacking of prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Mian Nawaz Sharif repeatedly was unjustified. It was the outcome of the differences between successive presidents of Pakistan, representing the ethos of the Pakistan army, and the political leadership. This was not over substantive national issues but the hegemony of power structures. The last of such episodes was the most wanton act of all and symbolic of the power-grasping disposition of individuals who care little for the constitutional organs of state.

What has the country achieved by this adventurism of individuals? The absence of democratic institutions has led to almost totalitarian rule. The benefits of collective consultation and institutionalised decision-making on vital national issues have been denied to the nation. Some of the adverse effects of personalised decision-making during the last eight years are summed up here.

Foremost of these is the use of brute force and the resultant acute feeling of alienation in Balochistan. Almost the entire politico-tribal leadership of the province feels marginalised. In spite of huge sums of money allocated for the province, the fissures have become deeper.

Even moderate and pro-federation personalities like Dr Abdul Hayee, Mir Hasil Bizenjo, Nawab Zulfiqar Magsi, Sardar Sanaullah Zehri, etc., are increasingly disgruntled. “Nationalists” like Sardar Ataullah Mengal and his son Akhtar Mengal, Nawab Khair Baksh Marri, Habib Jalib Baloch etc., are openly criticising the federation.

It will require a bold and sustained approach aimed at reconciliation and at giving political and tribal leadership its due place in the mainstream for fissiparous tendencies to be reversed. Tribalism in the hinterland of Balochistan may be an anachronism, yet the emergence of a new leadership to replace it is possible only through an enlightened political process.

The situation in North and South Waziristan as well as in the tribal areas, especially those contiguous with Afghanistan, has worsened alarmingly during the last few years.

While no one can deny the need to usher in a societal transformation in these parts of the country, considering the deep-rooted tribal customs and practices, the process has to be evolutionary and not at the point of the gun.

The abortive military operation and the subsequent unilateral ceasefire has led to the erosion of the federation’s authority and the weakening of its writ. For any future government, even to restore the status quo ante will be well-nigh impossible in the foreseeable future. A common factor responsible for the deterioration of the situation is that decision-making is not being done through institutional mechanism but in a personalised informal manner.

By keeping the mainstream political leadership out of the country, General Musharraf has facilitated the obscurantist clerics to fill the vacuum. Despite his frequent pronouncements of enlightened moderation, he buckles under the pressure exerted by retrogressive forces whenever he is confronted with a difficult situation. The Lal Masjid stand-off in the very heart of the federal capital is symptomatic of the phenomenon where institutional decision-making is absent and, in the process, irreparable damage is being done to the very fabric of civil society.

Lastly, coming to the recent crisis regarding the reference against Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, one can discern the same malaise of undermining the importance of vital institutions of the state. From one perspective, there was nothing exceptional in the Chief Justice being asked to resign from office. After all, members of the superior judiciary have been made to take oath under the provisional constitution orders of military governments. Those not obliging or not considered pliable were sent home unceremoniously.

However, little did General Musharraf expect a defiant “no.” More significantly, little did he anticipate the outburst of the instant and widespread anger, demonstrated initially by the lawyers’ community, and then almost simultaneously by the entire civil society, on seeing the Chief Justice being roughed up and an important institution of the state being trampled upon.

Now that the country is engulfed in crisis, prudence demands that General Musharraf takes steps to resolve it on an urgent basis. This he can do by putting the institution of the state above his own self; by not insisting on his election as president by the present assemblies which are in the throes of their own demise; by not insisting on retaining his uniform; by putting in place an independent and credible election commission; and by not obstructing the mainstream political leadership to participate in the political process. But will he?

azksherdil@gmail.com