The brutalising laws

“AFTER the elections faces have changed but not policies” is the commonly held, and freely expressed, opinion about the PPP government. One lets it pass for it is substantially true.

The ruling coalition also seems quite content with the policies it had inherited or, what looks more likely, does not feel confident enough to change them.

But when the same is said, and more stridently, by Liaquat Baloch, general secretary of the Jamaat-i-Islami, one is persuaded to ask him what policy change his party and its ally, Maulana Fazlur Rehman’s Jamiat-i-Ulema-i-Islam, were able to introduce when they were in power in the NWFP? Is vandalising billboards and music/video shops a policy change? Social life, political shenanigans, corruption, smuggling and all the rest went on in that province as it had before them and has been going on since.

Just a few miles from the seat of their Islamic government, the raging battles between the armed religious lashkars vying for supremacy in Bara and the Tirah valley became deadlier and the trade in narcotics also boomed. That the tribal areas were administered from the centre could be an alibi but that is not good enough. The Islamic coalition of the province could surely have used its ideological influence and political patronage to calm down the warring tribal factions.

The point to emphasise here is that in the given circumstances no government, whatever its complexion or commitment to the electorate, can have a policy of its own. It can devise only a strategy for contending with the compulsions and violence flowing from the adventures and disasters of the past and new ones that come up or are still in the making. The long-term commitments and a variety of forces that have come to the fore have made the basic policies in place all but irreversible.

Interestingly enough, all such policies had their roots in personal ambition but were given a religious colour. Gen Ziaul Haq’s Afghan policy for one. An Islamic republic, he reasoned but only to prolong his rule, should be defending not just its own territory but also its ideological frontiers — then threatened by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In other words it was the duty of our armed forces to fight to defend Islam in Afghanistan. Now, 20 years later, those very armed forces are finding it difficult to defend our own physical frontiers.

The Islamic resistance movement of that time has since turned into world terrorism. Pakistan had to pay and continues to pay a heavy price for its ideological ventures in the way of loss of trust abroad. Every government in Pakistan since then has been a hostage to religious extremism.

Before Ziaul Haq, the religious elements did not take long to join forces with the traders and industrialists hurt by Z.A. Bhutto’s nationalisation policy to drive him out of power. The ground for that was paved by Bhutto himself when, ignoring the founding father’s categorical advice to the contrary, he made religion the business of the state by amending the constitution. Wily Ziaul Haq followed it up with penal enactments to make religion a dominant force in politics.

The sectarian divisions since then have been exacerbating and turning violent. But no government has been able to bring itself up to scrap the laws and policies which have institutionalised intolerance and hate. Now all sections of society are its victims — the majority as much as the minorities. An agenda that was essentially political in the course of time has become a mindset to which the moderate, the tolerant, the intellectuals and the judges all have been succumbing. Let it be illustrated by a few recent events.

First, a gathering of religious leaders over which Mr Rafiq Tarar presided has ruled that any Muslim who changes his religion must be put to death and his property confiscated. Mr Tarar should have known that the country of which once he was the president is a signatory to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That declaration enjoins religious freedom which expressly includes the freedom to change one’s religion. If he was a conscientious objector to this policy of the state he should have refused to become its president where, in any case, for all of his tenure he remained a silent spectator of fateful events.

Second, a prison vast enough to accommodate 50,000 persons — men and women, young and old — may soon have to be established if the courts of law agree with the police and state prosecutors. These had held that by wearing badges which bore Quranic inscriptions the entire population of Chenab Nagar (Rabwah) had committed an offence that is punishable with imprisonment of up to three years under Pakistan’s penal code.

Third, 23 students (five among them girls) of Faisalabad’s Punjab Medical College were summarily expelled from that college by the principal on the complaint of the youth wing of a religious party that they were seen preaching their faith.

Human rights organisations worldwide have apparently taken notice of these incidents and will draw their own conclusions which, at a time when Pakistan is in the limelight for the prevalence of extremism and for sheltering terrorists, can be only scathing. Who is to be blamed more for Pakistan’s descent from a peaceable to a brutalised polity — the laws made by its assemblies or the bombers produced by its seminaries — remains a dilemma. What is not in doubt is that public opinion and the courts of law failed to play their part.

There is much noise now about an independent judiciary which signifies freedom from the pressures of the executive authority. To be really independent the judges must also be free from the fear of the fanatics. That, sadly, most of them are not. Will the campaigners for judicial freedom and my friends Aitzaz Ahsan and Athar Minallah please expand their agenda?

kunwaridris@hotmail.com

Issues and ‘non-issues’

SENATOR Khalid Mahmood (JUI-F) recently called upon Mr Nawaz Sharif (July 14) to stop raising “non-issues” such as the reinstatement of the deposed judges. Others have spoken in the same vein.

They assume that the government can tackle only one issue at a time, and that concern with the judges is keeping it from dealing with other more important issues.

The present government consists of some 50 divisions and related agencies where its work is done. Some items of business, regardless of where they have originated, come to a cabinet meeting and get settled there along with numerous other items on the agenda. Rarely is the cabinet called to meet to discuss and decide a single issue. The fear that concern with the judges has become an unacceptable distraction arises from ignorance of how governments work.

It may incidentally be noted that the judges are not distracting this government at all. Guided by Asif Ali Zardari, it has no intention of restoring the deposed judges. Mr Sharif’s statements for public consumption notwithstanding, he is aware of, and reconciled to, Mr Zardari’s position in this regard.

Addressing his supporters in London on July 15 Mr Sharif claimed to have an agenda for putting Pakistan on the road to progress and prosperity. It consisted of the following elements: (1) rule of law; (2) independence of the judiciary; (3) restoration of the deposed judges; (4) blocking the army’s intervention in governance; (5) parliamentary supremacy; (6) exclusion of foreign dictation; (7) accountability; and (8) institution of a treason case against Musharraf.

It will be seen that except for the president’s authority to dissolve the National Assembly in the event of a constitutional breakdown, all of Mr Sharif’s concerns are already met in the original version of the 1973 Constitution. The first order of business should then be to reinstate that version. Next, there is the fact that no government to date has been willing to follow the constitution, including the ones headed by Mr Sharif. One may wonder if Mr Sharif will do better next time if he gets another chance to be prime minister.

His professed goals are all worthy, but none of them is urgent in the sense that if it is not achieved right away calamity will befall the nation. We have seen times when we had no constitution at all and others when an unwanted constitution had been imposed on us. Can Mr Sharif’s agenda put our people on the road to progress and prosperity? In a manner of speaking, yes: if, for instance, our judiciary becomes independent and our public officials are made accountable to the people through appropriate organs of the state, progress may be said to have been made in the area of our civic culture. But progress has several other dimensions with which these developments have no causal connection.

Progress can also refer to the inclination to question the conventional wisdom, inquisitiveness, ingenuity and inventiveness, attainment of excellence in arts and sciences, tolerance of the dissident and, in sum, the ability to be at peace with complexity. Judicial independence, a virtue in itself, has little if anything to do with these attainments.

Prosperity, in the ordinary sense of the term, means that folks have money enough not only to meet their basic needs but also to make their living comfortable, even save and invest. This happens when agricultural production and incomes increase and commerce and industry expand, creating more jobs. These developments will not take place if law and order has broken down, uncertainty and insecurity prevail, or if governments are unstable and their policies infirm. But they are not likely to be directly affected by the degree to which public officials are accountable and judges are independent. If there is any relationship between these two areas of development, it is probably remote and peripheral.

It is amazing that the fight against militancy and restoration of law and order do not appear on top of Mr Sharif’s agenda. It is possible that he neglected to mention them in a fit of absent-mindedness. In any case, these are the two most pressing and urgent tasks to be accomplished if a state of utter chaos and impotence is to be avoided. Resorting to the use of indiscriminate and naked physical force against persons and property, kidnapping, arson and murder, and by waging war against the state of Pakistan, the militants are striving to strike terror in the hearts of the people and to bring the normal routines of life to a halt. They are out to destroy our state and society, our institutions and culture. They must be stopped.

Beyond the havoc the ideologically motivated militants are wreaking, there is the breakdown of law and order that conventional criminals cause. Criminals of all varieties — thieves, robbers, kidnappers for ransom, rapists, murderers and the perpetrators of white-collar crime — now abound. They too spread fear and insecurity among the people. Their operation works like a vicious circle: the more the law is violated the more the law-breakers increase.

There are problems that cannot be made to go away in a hurry regardless of who is at the helm. Food and fuel prices have risen dramatically in Pakistan, America, and many other places. No government in Islamabad can bring them back to where they were a year ago. There isn’t much that the government, this or any other, can do to pull the economy out of stagflation (recession and inflation at the same time). This is a state in which American and numerous other economies are currently placed. I hear that they are going to stay that way for another six months to a year, and that there is nothing the governments concerned can do to help them out.

But abatement of crime and the restoration of law and order, being the first and foremost duty of any government, should be within the capacity of the present administration. It is a matter of assigning these missions the priority they merit and allocating the requisite resources to pursue them. If Mr Gilani’s government does not have the will or the know-how to tackle these tasks it should vacate the seat of power. Eradication of militancy is admittedly a complicated and difficult undertaking. But it is not impossible; it requires a firm resolve and adequate material resources to succeed, which the present government has not been willing to assign it.

The writer is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

anwarsyed@cox.net

Old lions, new lines

WHAT an election and a bit of misreading can do to the most celebrated and the most colourful of our lion-hearted politicians. Politically and geographically apart, Sheikh Rashid Ahmed and Ghulam Mustafa Khar had a few things in common. They sure knew how to win an election and how to play to the basic instincts of people (men) to win popularity and a whirlwind of votes. The election on Feb 18 reduced them to shouting out warnings to whoever was still interested in listening to them.

With due respect to his extraordinary career as a lawmaker, it is the first time that Sheikh Rashid has been left without a large enough party to accommodate his brand of humour. Mr Khar by contrast is a veteran of the high and dry territory. This difference in circumstances has resulted in the two politicians taking entirely different approaches to overcoming their current woes.

Sheikh Rashid is new to the area and deeply aware of the strong sentiment against him among his old allies in the Sharif camp. He was itching to come up with a party of his own ever since his famous defeat on Feb 18. After deliberating for some time, and perhaps realising that the Chaudhries of Gujrat also didn’t offer him any big hope for the future, the Sheikh did finally launch his Awami (Muslim) League a few weeks ago.

While he did lose the vote in February, Mr Rashid has obviously not lost all sense of reality. He understands the trends around Raja Bazaar to know that he must continue with his long-drawn harangue against the Pakistan People’s Party to have any chance of redeeming himself politically. To his advantage his latest outbursts against the PPP have coincided with the criticism that has been mounted on Asif Zardari and Co from all sides and could consequently pass off as more than just a sheepish cry of a defeated man.

In fact, Sheikh Rashid doesn’t appear to have too many grudges against the people who actually ended his 23-year-long reign as the custodian of the anti-PPP club in Rawalpindi. Javed Hashmi and Haneef Abbasi, both of whom belong to the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz and who ran over Sheikh Rashid on two Rawalpindi seats in the general election, have been spared the bashing you would have thought was in store for Sheikh Saheb’s nemeses.

Instead the chief of the latest version of the Muslim League has chosen to introduce himself on the national level, his act severely hampered by the absence of known faces around him. His Awami remains a single-passenger carrier and the seasoned wayfarer obviously knows that he will have to tail his bogey to a more powerful engine sooner or later. Given his anti-PPP constituency, he will be better off speaking of his friendship with Shahbaz Sharif more frequently.

On this count, the distance he has come from the Chaudhries, whose auxiliaries the Sharifs cannot stand for the moment, will keep him on course and a few angry statements about Musharraf while the iron is hot will do no one any harm.

Ghulam Mustafa Khar is faced with a bigger dilemma. He has been involved in creating a party of his own too many times to know just how futile the exercise is. As a result, he is more interested in having the same old party with the topping of his choice.

Khar is adamant that Benazir Bhutto’s will that catapulted Mr Zardari from being an unwell, under-treatment and unwanted soul to the co-chairmanship of the PPP was fake and is ready to ally himself with anyone who has the pretence of being a PPP stakeholder and who is against the party’s current leadership. While he modestly declares himself as the only political successor to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, he says “the legal heirs of the Bhutto family are Zulfikar Junior, Fatima Bhutto and Sussui Bhutto”.

Mr Khar’s latest manoeuvres are extremely painful for those who remember his days as the unrivalled lion of Punjab. To make matters worse, these gestures come close on the heels of his apparent attempts to get friendly with the Sharifs. Not long before he attended all those calls in an orchestrated television show from his supporters who asked him to rejoin the PPP, he played the accompaniment as Nawaz Sharif set out on his return journey from London. If his basking in borrowed glory was not embarrassing enough, he did not seem to mind it a bit.

This brings out another commonality between Sheikh Rashid Ahmed and Ghulam Mustafa Khar: both are, for now at least, not acceptable to the Sharifs. Yet the bigger error of judgment on the two gentlemen’s part has been their failure to anticipate the verdict of Feb 18 even though it can be said to Sheikh Rashid’s credit that he did realise the truth just when it was about to happen. Even otherwise Mr Khar’s mistake was bigger for had he just contained his anger against the PPP a little longer he would have been a man in power today.