Bequeathing the party

POLITICIANS do not ordinarily bequeath their party posts even when they are fading away or death looks imminent. Benazir Bhutto chose to do it, as if it was a family trust, at a time when she was riding a popular wave that was likely to carry her to the highest office of the land for the third time while still in the prime of life.

But then Benazir was no ordinary politician. She laid down her own rules of conduct, defying laws and convention, sometimes even common sense, and was always willing to pay a price for it. She was elected prime minister twice and twice dismissed before she was 45. Had she lived to occupy that office again for the third time, very likely she would have earned a third dismissal for Musharraf had put 58-2(b) back in the Constitution.

In her own casual, charming, childish way she did what she wanted to do, brushing aside any counsel to the contrary howsoever sane or sincere it might have been. Leaving matters of state policy aside, this streak of her character showed itself in her day-to-day administrative decisions. Let it be illustrated by a personal example. When she first became prime minister toward the end of 1988, she appointed me as chief secretary of her home province ignoring all advice to the contrary. But some months later went on to transfer me ignoring every advice not to.

In a brief farewell encounter at the airport, when I sensed a faint expression of regret in her on my premature transfer, I chose to thank her for appointing me in the first instance when no other prime minister would have. I can only guess that she appointed me to that much-cherished job without having ever met me only to acknowledge that as home secretary of the province in the first year of Ziaul Haq’s martial law, I had done whatever little I could do to relieve the tedium of her lonely confinement at 70 Clifton. Her father then was in Lahore’s notorious Kot Lakhpat jail awaiting trial for murder and her mother was confined elsewhere.

But then she felt no qualms in getting me out of the way for not “helping her partymen” seeking jobs, lands and other favours. A politician has one kind of expectations while in office and another, quite to the contrary, when out of it. For civil servants the book of rules remains the same in either situation. It is a common characteristic of the Bhuttos that they are ruthlessly exacting in their demands when in power but remember and value even the slightest courtesy shown to them in adversity. That has been the experience of most public servants not with Benazir alone but with her father Zulfikar and uncle Mumtaz too.

One can imagine the same do-what-I-must quality in full play in her when President Ghulam Ishaq Khan, a stickler for rules, and later her own chosen faithful Farooq Leghari felt persuaded to dismiss her halfway through her two terms as prime minister. She seemed to relish the excitement of public office as much for its hazards as for its glamour.

The general feeling among officials in the government then was, and still remains, that her administration would have performed better and lasted longer only if she were left alone to follow her own uncomplicated, frugal instincts. The stress leading to confrontations was caused by hordes of partymen demanding instant reward for their ‘sacrifices’ and the presence of a husband who wanted to have a decisive say in the affairs of the state by virtue of that relationship alone. He then had no representative character nor held a public or party office.

Out of power and accused of maladministration and corruption, her hold on the popular mind at home did not waver and internationally she gained a stature unrivalled by any other Pakistani in recent times. Whatever her failings the country will not, perhaps, see the likes of her again.

Looking back in time, it is difficult to resist the thought how the country would have been spared much rigours of extremism had she been Gen Musharraf’s partner in governance in 1999. By choosing Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, who was a professed ally of the orthodox religious groups, Musharraf has made a moderate Pakistan into a world metaphor for militancy. In the growing prospect of the PPP and the army collaborating lay Pakistan’s best hope to roll back the tide of extremism. That hope must not die with Benazir’s death.

It would be a grievous repetition of his original mistake if Musharraf now were to permit the caretaker governments, the electoral and intelligence agencies and the Q-League to manipulate the polls to keep out of power the ascendant liberal forces in the PPP and PML-N. The situation also poses immensely testing challenges for Asif Zardari who, as Benazir has willed, will be leading the PPP for the next five years. His shenanigans in her previous governments will return to haunt the party once the sympathy wave subsides notwithstanding the steadfastness that he had shown in the long incarceration that followed.

To prove equal to the role the fate has thrust on him, Mr Zardari must not let the country’s biggest party degenerate into a patronage-based family cult superseding its councils and consultative processes. Besides sticking to Benazir’s policy of cooperating with the like-minded parties, the PML-N in particular, and avoiding confrontation with the ‘establishment’, the PPP should make every effort to seek an electoral understanding with the nationalists of Sindh, sardars of Balochistan and the ANP in the NWFP. Without their support it will not be possible to check the surge of extremism in the country and warfare in the border regions.

Finally Mr Zardari as chairman of the party, if he must, should make only policy statements and not throw out taunts. His rustic reaction to President Musharraf’s announcement about Scotland Yard investigating the murder of Benazir strongly suggests that men like Makhdoom Amin Fahim, Aitzaz Ahsan and Raza Rabbani should act as the spokesmen and public face of the party.

Obama’s journey

EVEN with this year’s changes, an American presidential election is still a marathon not a sprint. So start with some provisos. The winning numbers in the 2008 Iowa presidential caucuses were not overwhelming. Barack Obama won the Democratic contest with 38 per cent of the vote. Mike Huckabee took the Republican race with 34 per cent. Neither victory was unexpected. Nor did either of them deliver a knockout blow. In both cases, strong rivals are very much alive to fight and possibly win another day, starting in New Hampshire on Tuesday.

History also teaches that victory or defeat in Iowa are not always reliable predictors of the eventual national outcome. Natural campaigners like Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton both lost there before going on to be two-term presidents. So do not jump to too many conclusions too soon. The 2008 contest could still be the long-predicted contest between Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani, not a match-up between Mr Obama and Mr Huckabee.

Yet do not shy away from the obvious, either. On the Democratic side, the next presidential candidate will now be either a black man or a woman –– and the chances have risen that it will be Mr Obama. Three details from the Iowa voting are particularly telling, especially if they are repeated in New Hampshire.

The first is that Mr Obama outpolled Mrs Clinton among women, supposedly her great strength. The second is that he easily outpolled her among independents. And the third is that Mr Obama was overwhelmingly the candidate of new, young Democratic voters. Mrs Clinton is an immensely impressive candidate in so many ways. But her performance in Iowa was a sharp reminder that a lot of Americans do not warm to her. Given the determination of Democrats to pick a winner this year, she must recover in New Hampshire if she is to prevail.

The position on the right is much less certain. Mr Huckabee won in Iowa for a lot of negative reasons - prime among them a palpable uncertainty about the Mormon ex-governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney - but also for a positive one. Mr Huckabee got out the conservative and evangelical Christian vote that has been George Bush’s political bedrock. The question now is whether, with his likeable manner, Mr Huckabee can reach out beyond that base more successfully than Pat Robertson, who ran strongly in Iowa in 1988. If not, his main role in this election may be to have punctured Mr Romney’s hopes, allowing John McCain to come through in New Hampshire or Mr Giuliani in Florida.

Iowa revealed an America we all need: one that is seeking to move beyond the Bush years - and perhaps the Clinton years too. The buzzword in Iowa for all candidates was change. No one in any party ran as the candidate of the status quo. Not surprisingly, the Democrats are more comfortable with this than the Republicans and thus more likely to profit from it. The road to the presidency is never straightforward, but the message from Iowa is truly remarkable. In January 2009 there could be a black man in the White House, not serving the drinks but sitting in the Oval Office itself.––The Guardian, London

The PPP after BB

A DOCUMENT, purportedly Benazir Bhutto’s last will and testament, was read out to members of the PPP’s central executive committee. It revealed that she had nominated Asif Ali Zardari to be her successor as party chairperson.

Accordingly they offered him the post which he opted to assign to his son Bilawal, a 19-year-old first-year student at Oxford. Father and son were then named the party’s co-chairman and chairman respectively. One may ask if it was appropriate for Ms Bhutto to have appointed her successor. Let us look at some aspects of the party’s history.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto founded the PPP 40 years ago. It did have a central committee with which he broached issues but he was the one who finally settled them. He appointed persons to party posts and discharged them as he deemed fit. It was hard for external observers to separate the PPP from him. It appeared that the PPP could not be without him.

General Ziaul Haq removed Mr Bhutto from power on July 5, 1977 and hanged him less than two years later (April 4, 1979). He then proceeded to do all in his power to decimate the PPP. Begum Nusrat Bhutto and Benazir, who attempted to keep the party alive and well, were jailed and later made to leave the country. Party workers, and some middle-ranking leaders, were hunted, flogged, imprisoned and in many instances killed. Some of the higher-ranking party notables went abroad or chose to retire and stay home. Yet the PPP not only survived but remained a force to be reckoned with. How did that happen?

PPP workers and supporters were devoted to Mr Bhutto when he was living and they cherished his memory when he was gone. While his oratorical skills attracted large audiences to his meetings, it was the ideals and values he professed and advocated (equality, democracy, sovereignty of the people and their entitlement to the basic amenities of life) that gave him an abiding place in the hearts and minds of party workers and, beyond them, masses of the poor and deprived. In time they internalised the commitment to these ideals and began to see the party as their embodiment. Even now when they shout that Bhutto lives on, they mean that the ideals and values he espoused remain as the proper guides to policy choices.Benazir succeeded her father as the party’s principal leader after her mother (initially co-chairperson) went into retirement. She was about 27 at the time, with degrees from Harvard and Oxford, already an accomplished public speaker in English and on the way to attaining a measure of proficiency in Urdu. She was a tall, fair, strikingly good-looking young woman. Above all she was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s beloved daughter. All of this endeared her to the people. She worked hard at being an effective political leader. Her Urdu speech improved tremendously with time: her verb endings might not always agree with number and gender but her vocabulary in nouns and adjectives had increased to an astonishing extent.

She adopted the party’s idiom and metaphor and fully internalised its professed values and ideals. She became as vigorous a proponent of these ideals as her father had been. She was one of the PPP’s greatest assets.

Yet, one may argue that she should have resisted the temptation of treating the party as a personal possession whose future managers she was entitled to name in her will. It was not so much her person as her and her followers’ commitment to the aforementioned ideals and values that kept the PPP in good health and vigour.

A few other considerations are to be kept in mind. Assuming for a moment that it was all right for her to name her successor, the worthiness of her choice is open to question. Mr Zardari has none of her more attractive qualifications. He has no standing to speak of in the country’s politics even if he does understand its deviousness. The reputation he made for himself during Ms Bhutto’s two terms as prime minister was far from enviable. The mileage in terms of popular approval he can get from his earlier connection with Benazir Bhutto will be very limited indeed.

It may be safe to assume that Bilawal ‘Bhutto’ Zardari, a teenager who has lived mostly abroad, has not had much of exposure to Pakistani culture. My hunch is that he cannot speak Urdu, and I would not be surprised if it turned out that he did not speak Sindhi either. It will be many years before he can begin to understand the intricacies of Pakistani politics and many more before he can learn to be a leader. And we cannot rule out the possibility that his interest in the craft of politics will not last that long.

Politics in Pakistan is mostly personalised. Allegiance to parties is often nothing more than allegiance to a powerful individual. If and when his star begins to go down his following dissipates and the party disappears or breaks into warring factions. That makes for political instability, usually attributed to the neglect and the resulting weakness of political institutions. Yet the warlords of Pakistani politics shun institutionalisation because it is a negation of personalised politics.

It is not true that we as a people, wedded to personalism, are incapable of building and keeping institutions. Jamaat-i-Islami is surely an institution. Its successive presidents were not relatives, and none of them ran the party as a one-man show. Setting aside the fact that Maulana Fazlur Rehman is the son of Maulana Mufti Mahmood, once president of the JUI, one may say the same of that party as well.

Will the PPP’s central executive committee members take their party’s currently viable organisation towards institutionalisation? Bilawal will be in no position to act as a political leader for another ten years, maybe even longer. They are then left with Mr Zardari for the next several years. Considering his aforementioned disabilities, there is no reason to assign him, or let him assume, the role of the party’s sole spokesman and manager.

The committee could start acting as its designation implies, that is as the party’s collegiate executive. On several occasions during the last two or three years, Mr Zardari was reported to be gravely ill and hospitalised in London and New York for extended periods of time. Assuming that he is now well, and assuming that he will be living in Pakistan and not in Dubai or London or New York, he may chair the executive committee’s meetings when they are called, have his say on issues under consideration as its other members will, and let decisions be made by majority vote.

The executive committee now has the opportunity of implementing its departed and beloved leader’s strident calls for democracy in her party’s internal workings. Authoritarianism needs to be expelled not only from the formal organs of governance but also from within party organisations. This is an opportunity the PPP elders must not allow to slip away.

The writer is a visiting professor at the Lahore School of Economics.

anwars@lahoreschool.edu.pk

After Dec 27, what?

ON Nov 9, 2001, Musharraf’s assurance to side with the US prevented Pakistan from being taken to the stone age but six years down the road it may be leading the county to an implosion.

After the assassination of Benazir Bhutto no one knows where we are heading. The nation is stunned and the question everyone is asking is, ‘What next?’

The tragedy can perhaps be viewed from two perspectives, internal and external. Internally, the PPP is one of the two mainstream parties in Pakistan and there can be no argument that national political parties are essential to keep the country together. With the departure of Benazir, the existence of the PPP as one party may be at stake.The weakening of a major national party, or its splintering, is not only bad for the party itself but a bad omen for national unity. Added to it is a sense of deprivation among rural Sindhis, whether correct or perceived. It can only get worse when their main hope in the person of Benazir is no more. The circumstances of her death — a leader of Sindhi origin killed in Punjab — can become a provocative issue. No wonder the first concern of most on hearing the news of Benazir’s death was the unity of the country. The continuation of the PPP as a national party without splintering is most important for the unity of the country.

Another issue that can rankle in the minds of her supporters is the pre-emptive letter she wrote to the government immediately before her return in October, warning against certain members of the establishment and casting doubts on the intentions of the government. The controversy over whether she died of a bullet wound or a skull fracture after hitting her head against the sunroof of the Land Cruiser she was riding can only fuel conspiracy theories, as the use of bullets by sharpshooters is not a pattern usually associated with Islamic extremists.

Then there is the international angle. Benazir’s positioning of the PPP as a moderate forward-looking party with the agenda of crushing extremism is a stance supported by a majority of Pakistanis. But what made her task difficult was her public identification with the US for achieving this objective. While most Pakistanis want to quell extremism in the country, they want to do it for themselves and not for the Americans. This close identification with the US is the red rag for the extremists, which she could have done without considering that fighting extremism is not an easy task in the best of circumstances.

A viewing of CNN and Fox News shows how their prominent analysts identified the US with Benazir as their main weapon in fighting extremism in Pakistan. One of them pointed out in a talk show, in the first person, that “we” committed two mistakes. Firstly we did not insist on fair and free elections and secondly “we” did not insist on the protection that Benazir demanded and Musharraf denied. The demise of Benazir and the future of Pakistan are of such concern for the US that it has even become a major issue in the US elections. While US concern for Pakistan is understandable, considering its strategic location with reference to the on terror and the West’s phobia of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of extremists, it is important for Pakistan to seem to be its own master, rather than a lackey of the US, in order to give itself a reasonable chance of fighting Talibanisation.

The burning and looting after such a tragic event, though reprehensible, are the normal forms of expression of anger, grief and helplessness and have to be expected and handled as best as possible. The important thing, however, is correct decisions by the government from here on, actions that are genuinely based on the slogan ‘Pakistan first’, which are popular with our government and do not confuse Pakistan with any individual.

The usual knee-jerk reaction to a worsening law and order situation, which is expected after such tragedy, is to induct more troops, use more force and ultimately impose another martial law/emergency. But as the Nov 3 decision indicated, these unconstitutional options, though they offer a quick fix, do not really resolve problems. What is still the best option is a free and genuinely fair election that could assuage feelings, provided it is not held with the present judiciary, interim government, Election Commission and the local bodies in place.

Bush’s ‘advice’ in his condolence speech on the demise of Benazir, asking Pakistan to continue with the democratic process, need not be ‘complied’ with literally but would be more useful for both parties if it were complied with in spirit.