THE defence minister’s idea of a national government to replace the caretaker cabinet has turned out to be stillborn. Nawaz Sharif rejected it before President Musharraf dismissed it as mere rumour-mongering. To the president the cabinet proceedings seem to mean no more than rumours. The fateful discussions, of course, take place only in his chambers.

Nawaz Sharif wants a national government before the elections but without Musharraf. Persuaded by Benazir Bhutto, Mian Nawaz Sharif agreed to end the poll boycott but his public stance that Musharraf must go if elections are to be free and fair has been hardening. Mian Sahib has not cared to explain how he would make him go.

The PPP, though not asking for the resignation of the president, is getting increasingly apprehensive of rigging. On her return from exile Benazir

Bhutto had said that she would be willing to work with Musharraf. Her successors are less sure.

For them, it is a decision to be made after the polls. The party, it seems, would be prepared to own Musharraf if it can form a government by itself or is able to put together a coalition. Denied that position, it may join forces with the PML-N to oust Musharraf or, at least, curtail his powers to the level they were before the constitutional amendments made by him.

The last laugh, however, may belong to the boycotting Qazi Hussain Ahmad and Imran Khan (whom Nawaz Sharif has quietly and surprisingly deserted) if the PML-N, as well as the PPP, is left out in the cold, and instead, the PML-Q, MQM and Maulana Fazlur Rehman’s JUI were to join hands to form the government.

But the current perception of both political pundits and the public is that such an eventuality may occur only if the polls are massively rigged.

The former chairman of the Senate and a Musharraf supporter, Wasim Sajjad, was heard on a TV channel the other day counselling the leaders in the opposition with lyrical profundity not to make demands or lay down conditions.

Instead, they should take part in the elections wholeheartedly and if the polls are rigged the people would reject them as they did in 1977.

In so counselling, Mr Sajjad failed to recall that the mass rejection then did not result in fresh and fair polls but in martial law.

So it will be this time round if those seeking advance and legitimate safeguards against rigging were to succumb to Mr Sajjad’s advice or to the president’s authority.

The people can bring down a government through street power (as they did in Ayub’s and Bhutto’s case) but can install a government of their choice only through a free ballot. Every thought, therefore, should be given to the holding of an election that is fair rather than dealing with the consequences of a rigged one.

The burden of allaying fears of rigging lies entirely on the president.

If the people believe, and their belief is not without evidence, that Musharraf’s hand-picked caretaker cabinet cannot be impartial, and a national (or all-party) cabinet with or without Musharraf is not an acceptable or feasible alternative, the only course available is to have an interim cabinet comprising experts who have integrity but no party affiliation.

The composition and effectiveness of such a cabinet may not satisfy all elements in the opposition but it would be surely less controversial than the lot of caretakers who are all nominees of the person who is suspected — whether rightly or not is besides the point — of planning the rigging.

Equally justified is the demand of the opposition for the reconstitution of the election commission. Many have been doubtful of the impartiality of the commission but Shahbaz Sharif has now chosen to call it outright a tool of the government.

The president would do well to reconstitute the commission without hesitation or delay. There can be no easier way of ridding himself of the charge of rigging.

The selection of the chief election commissioner and members of the commission under the Constitution has to be restricted to serving and retired judges. The presently serving judges may be left out because they are, unfortunately, now being viewed either on the side of the president or against him.

Among the retired judges who have all along remained aloof from politics and have not been involved in the current judicial row Ajmal Mian and Mamoon Kazi come to mind. Either of them heading the commission should inspire confidence in its independence.

The president has countered the demand of the opposition for the suspension of the nazims, or dissolution of the local councils, with queer logic.

Should the ministers be suspended and assemblies dissolved when the elections of the nazims and councils are held is the tongue-in-cheek question that he poses. His counterblast is not relevant.

The opposition is demanding the suspension of the nazims because they are responsible for law and order in the field and, further, because the polling stations will be manned by government servants who work under them.

The nazims can make or mar their career. The members of the national and provincial assemblies, on the other hand, are not concerned with law and order nor will they have control over the staff that may be employed for the local council elections.

The basic fault lies with Musharraf’s own scheme of governance which envisaged that the nazims would act and behave like career civil servants. In practice they are deeply immersed in party politics and are not bound by the rules of business and conduct which govern civil servants.

The apprehension of the opposition that the president, the caretaker cabinet, the election commission and the nazims will all be involved in rigging in one way or the other may be exaggerated. But it is a fear that is deep-rooted and not without basis.

The remedy being suggested here is simple and will not delay the polls. The crisis facing the country is humanitarian. It calls for a solution which is rooted in basic human virtues and not in politics or the law.

For the common man on whom this fuss focuses, no government is better or worse than the other, none is caring. He asks only for peace and safety to get on with his life carrying his own burden.

That even that much has been denied to him all along is borne out by the charges being traded daily by leaders past and present through costly newspaper advertisements.

THE succession issue is by no means peculiar to a house or two in Naudero in interior Sindh. The all-prevailing family system holds hostage a whole generation across this land of values. It holds sway over people as well as their representatives. Rubina Shaheen Wattoo may be an exact image of her father’s, but surely it is not her face that adorns her election poster.

The mug shot is her father’s. A graduate of a college in Lahore and a “housewife”, family reasons propelled Ms Wattoo to a seat in the National Assembly in the general election of 2002.

Back then, her father, the illustrious former Punjab chief minister, Manzoor Ahmed Wattoo, was legally barred from taking part in the polls.

Five years later, Ms Wattoo has been reduced to contesting for a provincial assembly seat in her native Okara while her father is all poised to fight in two National Assembly constituencies against the wishes of his party bosses. Family reasons so demand.

Further south in Punjab, in Muzaffargarh, Hina Rabbani Khar is a candidate for a National Assembly seat even while the pre-poll signs in the area may not appear to suggest this.

Her father hogs public attention and his picture monopolises the publicity material in Ms Khar’s campaign. A member in the last assembly, she has switched from the Pakistan Muslim League-Q to the Pakistan People’s Party and this time round she doesn’t have to literally contend with so many of her cousins for national honours.

Between 2002 and now, Ms Khar has held the public office of a minister. Yet the slogan, dictated by family honour, remains the same as it was back in the last election: vote for Mr Noor Rabbani Khar.

Daughters are almost always the flag-bearers of change. When they are so encumbered by parochial considerations, the worldly sons can hardly be expected to fare any better, leading to pessimistic observations about the new-generation Pakistanis’ capacity to harbour rebellious vices, at least in the period when they are young. (What use are the young without their vices?)

In the city of Lahore that continues to be viewed by people from close and afar as a venue for refining or plainly expanding their politics, the task of advancing the Gujrat campaign has been assigned to a youthful Chaudhry, Moonis Elahi.

That the gentleman is averse to making a break with tradition is manifest in how he detained a group of rookie journalistic investigators prowling near his family estate recently.

Like we say in Lahore, those who fear all new things must cling to the bicycle as the first and the only invention. They do not necessarily have to be old to peddle this theory.

Also in Lahore, a Sharif aide says the family youngsters are taking care of the family business just as earnestly and simply as their elders had done. The emphasis on continuity and tradition jars.

They could have been doing anything but what they are doing.

The system sucks up the young in succession, and it doesn’t discriminate between classes. How the old family bonds are holding is reflected in the way we vote — as minions kept in bondage in our houses through an executive order and not as thinking individuals with personal preferences. It is the houses that vote en masse, not the individuals that make up these houses.

This house belongs to the Muslim League and that one down there is wedded to the Pakistan People’s Party. Haji Sahib’s house? That has forever sided with the right.

There are still few indica-tions of a split that is at the core of democracy, its first prerequisite.

Family (read patriarchy) and democracy cannot coexist — in the political sense in today’s Pakistan. The households have to be broken down to the basic unit of an individual in aid of the one-man, one-vote concept as also for the benefit of democratisation of politics inside political parties. The individuals can then get together in groups of their choice. At the moment, the process is too slow to inspire expectations for an in-house transformation in the near future.

Mythology tells us that these barriers were broken at least once in the general election of 1970.

Family lore has it that mother had then refused her father’s call to double as someone else and vote for a Jamaat-i-Islami candidate in the garb of a burqa. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had gone on to win the contest — a Bhutto who had started off young with all his vices.

Bhutto was in his 30s when he rebelled against the man he had until then reverently addressed as “daddy”. He went on to become the prime minister, shone as a pan-Islamist and gave the country its constitution. Thirty years down the road what endears him to the people is not his acts in power, but the spell he cast with his rebellious antics in the street. Same holds true for his daughter who began her political life wearing her father’s mantle.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, notwithstanding his actions later on, was the last young rebel that we produced.

Since then, patriarchy has kept the young on a tight leash, co-opting them without too much difficulty. Unless and until the family is dismantled in the political sense and the resultant groups take over, we Pakistanis can do little more than hope for a challenger emerging from within the elite political households.

And even while capitalism may be serving — breaking the society down to the unit of an individual — we are seriously lacking in a political ideology to harness these individuals into effective lobbies.

AS the mystery around Benazir Bhutto’s assassination remains surrounded by uncertainty over who should conduct the probe, US President George W. Bush has already pronounced his judgment. According to him, Pakistan’s religious extremists were responsible for the murder of Benazir Bhutto. In his last weekly radio address, he claimed that Ms Bhutto’s assassination bore all the hallmarks of an Al Qaeda operation.

It is the same precipitous thinking that our government’s spokesman Brig (retd) Javed Cheema tried to sell in his first hurriedly called media briefing after the Dec 27 tragedy. He even read a transcript of the telephonic conversation ostensibly between the militant culprits exchanging compliments and sharing their joy over the “mission accomplished”. No one believed the story.

He then came out with a different explanation altogether. According to him, “she would have lived if only she had stayed inside her car”. He incredibly claimed that she died only because she fatally hit the lever in the sunroof of her vehicle when she ducked back into the car after she heard gunshots around her. He surely meant that it was not a case of the state’s failure in its obligation of “denying terrorists access to their target and the desired impact of their attack”.

The caretaker government came out with at least three different versions of the causes of Benazir’s death. These inconsistencies raised serious concerns and doubts about the credibility of the government. Within minutes of the blood and fire incident, the crime scene was washed with water. Contrary to the categorical requirement of the law, an autopsy was not conducted on the slain leader. It is not clear whether these were acts of inadvertent professional inefficiency or a case of hardcore professional “diligence and efficiency”.

But one thing is clear. The state cannot evade the ultimate responsibility for protecting the lives of its citizen. In this instance, it had a special obligation to ensure the optimal safety of a former Pakistani prime minister whose security concerns were fully known to it and had become a reality after the Oct 18 tragedy in Karachi. The question of investigating Benazir Bhutto’s assassination is now a big challenge for the government and a dilemma for the country. It has also drawn world attention.

Everybody wants to know who killed Benazir Bhutto and why. Only an independent and credible enquiry will determine the truth. The PPP is calling for an international probe under UN auspices. President Musharraf, however, has ruled out any UN involvement in the investigation of what he describes as a simple murder which he insists can be handled internally by his government with the help of Scotland Yard.

Whatever the reality, the people of Pakistan also have no faith or confidence in the ability of our government agencies to conduct a fair and transparent investigation that would credibly determine the facts. This credibility gap is a reality. The people have yet to see any meaningful outcome of earlier investigations into scores of other tragedies and terrorist attacks in the country.

Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, however, cannot be treated like other “simple murders.” It is a national tragedy and a seismic event with far-reaching ripple effects not only for our political scene but also for the very future of Pakistan’s federation. Given the prevailing scepticism over the prospects of a fair and impartial investigation under government auspices, the PPP demand and its rationale for a UN probe makes lot of sense.

But at the same time, one should have no illusions about the UN’s capability or skills to conduct an impartial enquiry. Like the government in Pakistan, the UN also suffers from a serious credibility deficit. The post-9/11 world, in particular, has seen unprecedented erosion of the role, authority and credibility of the UN which is no longer a meaningful arbiter on issues of global relevance and importance. Its decisions are now taken in Washington, not New York.

Ironically, both Pakistan and the UN have many similarities including several dilemmas of the same kind. The UN, like Pakistan, is internally weak and frail, and in the absence of democracy and the rule of law, its decision-making is flawed, undemocratic and totally inconsistent with the universally acknowledged principle of sovereign equality. It stands crippled by incessant scandals of corruption, abuse of authority, inefficiency and gross mismanagement.

Two years senior in age to our own country, the UN is doing no better with a woeful record of failures and a dismal culture of poor governance. The UN Security Council has been reduced to a mere debating club with no authority or credibility in its resolutions or decisions. The real power lies with its veto-wielding five permanent members called the P-5 which frequently override the sovereign will of the remaining UN membership.

Against this grim backdrop, no miracles or free and fair verdicts can be expected from any UN-sponsored probe. Irrespective of circumstantial similarities in the assassinations of our former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, and Lebanon’s former prime minister, Rafik Hariri, there is a qualitative difference between the two situations.

In Hariri’s case, the US and its western partners in the Security Council are the real “sponsors, promoters, organisers and financiers” of the UN’s involvement for reasons known to the world. In Bhutto’s case, they may be sympathetic to the slain leader but in effect they are on the other side. From the historical, political and legal perspectives, one can’t therefore draw a straight parallel between the two cases.

Benazir Bhutto’s assassination could certainly be taken up for suo motu action in the UN Security Council subject to a green signal from Washington only if it was found to have a definite terrorist dimension. It would then be either a case of the state’s failure in its obligation of “denying terrorists access to their target and the desired impact” or a situation warranting external assistance in deterring the terrorist threat.In either case, Pakistan would be in hot water. We must keep in mind that we do not have many well-wishers in the Security Council. Once the Council gets seized of our internal affairs, there would be no end to it. Those who want to destabilise us will find a convenient multilateral tool not only to further their multiple agendas against Pakistan but also to legitimise them.

Benazir Bhutto’s assassination is a formidable challenge for both the government and the people of Pakistan. The challenge for the government is to rise above its tunnel vision and accept its failure in preventing the tragedy that it knew was coming.

It must allow an independent enquiry into this tragedy through a high-level non-governmental commission headed by a retired Supreme Court Chief Justice and comprising eminent persons of non-partisan stature with an investigative background, assisted preferably by the International Commission of Jurists and other relevant foreign experts.

The challenge for the people is not to let Mohtarma’s supreme sacrifice go in vain. She died for the people and for their inalienable right to be the masters of their own destiny. Her mission must be accomplished. Let us focus on reverting to a genuine democratic order. Democracy will be the best revenge for her tragic death.