THE reality of Ajmal Kasab is a mystery that is likely to get buried in the battle of wits and nerves between Pakistan and India. While we thought we had found him through investigative reporting by foreign and Pakistani journalists in Faridkot near Okara, we are now told that such an individual never existed in Pakistan.

Some journalists had apparently met the family, talked to the villagers and dug out references to Kasab and his parents in the electoral rolls of Faridkot. But now we are told that there is no mention of the family in the electoral list. Even the president, unmoved by reported comments of the man said to be Kasab’s father, says that he has seen no evidence to prove Kasab is Pakistani.

Does this mean that the problem is solved? Yes the short-term issue is resolved. If Kasab’s family is not in Faridkot and all evidence regarding their links to the village have now gone missing, it would be difficult for any other country to prove that anyone from Pakistan was involved in the Mumbai attack. The Indians can continue to indulge in hype as much as they please but Kasab will remain a mystery.

However, are we looking at the real question which is that there has been a gradual transformation of society leading to the creation of pockets of population or youth that behave exactly like Kasab? Those involved in the Marriott blast are said to be from Lashkar-i-Jhangavi. The young man who tried to carry out a suicide attack in Wah Cantt some time ago and was caught was from Khushab and the man responsible for the post-Marriott blast at Islamabad’s Police Lines was from Rahim Yar Khan. We can all forget about Kasab but one must ask what is happening to the youth from Pakistan, and in this context ‘mainland’ Punjab, who are involved in suicide attacks within the country, perhaps even in the region?

A popular argument is that the transformation of those living an ordinary existence into individuals with an extremist bent of mind is caused by poverty. It is indeed undeniable that years of poverty compounded with poor governance have disillusioned many people who then seek an outlet through aligning themselves with various militant outfits. Given that these outfits continue to be effective in certain areas, it is apparent that people are being drawn to them. In fact, in the days before 9/11 there were about 72 militant outfits that have since regrouped and consolidated themselves in smaller numbers but with greater power and influence.

Resultantly, a lot of activities are centred in and around Punjab which was always considered socially and economically more advanced than other parts of the country such as the Frontier, Balochistan and Sindh. However, Punjab cannot be treated as a monolith. There are parts of Punjab which are very different from some others. For instance, while we talk about tribal areas in the Frontier, we barely notice that there are equally ungoverned spaces in Punjab as well, especially south Punjab. There are areas in the latter where the writ of state does not apply and where there is even an absence of documentation of land. South Punjab or areas bordering on the region (which includes Okara) are also interesting from the perspective of social transformation because these areas were once known for Sufi traditions, which continue to exist side by side with the growing influence of militant groups.

An interesting comparison can be drawn with Sindh which had almost the same culture as south Punjab but appears to be less affected by the social transformation that we see in the latter. So, poverty alone does not explain the social change. In fact, if poverty was the primary cause of religious extremism then the entire South Asian region would be ripe for extremism — be it any religion.

The story of social change in Punjab dates back to the first Afghan war during the 1980s when foreign and domestic agencies of the state encouraged the transformation of religious discourse in some areas. The process did not discontinue with the end of the Afghan war. It also nourished the larger unplanned social transformation taking place in these sub-regions. For instance, part of the problem lay in the unplanned urbanisation of the rural areas and increasing rural poverty.

The population boom has resulted in the unplanned growth of villages that no longer qualify as such and have in fact turned into small towns albeit with limited employment opportunities and little access to facilities that indicate social mobility. Local politics and bureaucratic inefficiency are the reasons behind the absence of a system of establishing town committees or giving these towns a new status i.e. development plans are still what one sees for a village. No surprise then that there should be limited health and educational facilities and hardly any new jobs being created.

Youth from the rural areas bordering these new towns get affected mainly because economic opportunities are limited due to growing rural poverty. These young men are easily targeted by militant organisations. There are large pockets in Punjab that today serve as recruiting grounds for militancy mainly because of poverty, the breakdown of the social infrastructure and the expansion of madressahs. Religious seminaries may not be militant training camps but are good for ideological transformation of helpless youth with nothing better to do than consider themselves saviours of the entire Muslim population all over the world by conforming to militancy.

These sub-regions are exceptionally unfortunate because the scions of their traditional elite tend to migrate to more affluent parts of the province or country. So, the elite, which includes the large landowners, pirs, and others have little interest in reaching out to the people. The bulk of the new capital or the middle class is either too scared to speak up or is complicit in the growth of militancy or orthodoxy which they possibly see as a tool of renegotiating political power. Meanwhile, the social discourse has been changing rapidly.

Apparently, there is no visible plan to check the social transformation that has begun to forcibly silence the bulk of the population. People are increasingly becoming scared of militant outfits. Under the circumstances, this phenomenon of a silent and gradual social transformation is far more lethal than owning or disowning Kasab.

The writer is an independent strategic and political analyst.

ayesha.ibd@gmail.com

TENSIONS, if prolonged, burst into consequences which are hard to handle. A warlike atmosphere comes to dominate. Nations are sucked into the cycle of jingoism because they feel insecure.

In the process, people have their liberty restricted willingly. New Delhi has enacted a new, harsher detention law. And all know who calls the shots in Pakistan. Still, for Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee to ask with whom India should deal is meant only to score a point.

In Pakistan, it is the army which has been operating for several decades, often overtly and sometimes behind a democratic facade. If New Delhi has done business with army-guided governments then why ask President Asif Ali Zardari to prove his credentials? However weak and wanting, his is a democratically elected set-up. The voters queued before polling booths to elect their representatives.

Gen Pervez Musharraf ruled Pakistan for nine years. New Delhi never questioned his legitimacy. Why in the case of Zardari? True, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto enjoyed all powers as prime minister of a democratic country. But he came in the wake of the creation of Bangladesh when the army was being blamed for losing half the country. The circumstances are different now.

Like Bhutto, Zardari assumed that he had all power. But he found that this was not so when the government first declared it would send the ISI chief to Delhi after having acceded to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s request in the wake of the Mumbai blasts and then was not able to do so. What should he have done? Admitted his helplessness in public? No ruler does. He could have resigned but Pakistan does not have a tradition of doing so.

Knowing all this, Mukherjee should have refrained from asking who rules in Pakistan. This has further exposed the Zardari government. But then New Delhi’s problem is that it is under a lot of pressure to act after the terrorist attack on Mumbai. Yet, India might have strengthened Zardari if it had not posed the question that Mukherjee did. The top brass in Pakistan might have realised that New Delhi preferred to do business with a democratically elected government even though the real power was in the hands of the army. The statement by army chief Gen Kayani that Pakistan would retaliate within minutes in case of an Indian strike was meant to underline the point.

The question to ask Islamabad is not who governs Pakistan, but how can it be helped to get back to the democracy that the country enjoyed for a few years after its birth? Yet the Zardari government should understand the extent of anger which is sweeping India. However helpless, Pakistan has to deliver. It cannot be a party to a cover-up job. Why should Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani and his master’s voice Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi indicate that the terrorists who attacked Mumbai were not Pakistanis? Ajmal Kasab, the terrorist caught alive, has sought legal assistance from the Zardari government.

Former Pakistani premier, Nawaz Sharif, whose prestige is going up by the day, rightly pointed out that Kasab’s case gave the impression that Pakistan was a failed state. Why should Islamabad go on repeating that India had not given any credible proof about the terrorists’ Pakistani identity?

Zardari’s embarrassment is understandable. It is apparent that he came to know about the attack on Mumbai only after it had taken place. After all, Nawaz Sharif did not know Musharraf was sending troops to Kargil until the operation began. However, once Nawaz Sharif became aware of it he came clean. It cost him his prime ministership because when he tried to act against army chief Musharraf, the latter took over the government.

A respected Pakistani expert, Ahmed Rashid, has said that the attack on Mumbai is the handiwork of the Pakistani Taliban. It is possible that the Taliban and the jihadis straddling Pakistan and Afghanistan have jointly conducted the Mumbai carnage. This development is as much disturbing for Pakistan as it is for India. Zardari cannot ignore the allegations that Pakistani territory was used to plan and execute the attack. He should have not only taken measures to expose but also to curb the terrorists and their sponsors. By doing this he would have sustained the goodwill he won in India within the first few weeks of his taking over.

Even now it is not too late. The mood in India is nasty and the parliament session has shown that Zardari will have to come down really hard on terrorists in Pakistan. Jaish-i-Mohammad chief Masood Azhar should have been tried by this time considering his links to the attack on the Indian Parliament House in 2001. Surely, Zardari and his colleagues do not entertain the thesis that the entire operation was carried out by certain elements in the Indian government helped by BJP extremists. The very idea of India killing nearly 200 of its own, causing a loss of at least $2bn and exposing its ineptness before the world is preposterous.

This theory circulated after the killing of Anti Terrorists Squad chief Hemant Karkare who found a Vishwa Hindu Parishad hand in the Malegaon blasts. It was assumed that he was silenced because he had a lot more to say. A high-level police inquiry has proved that Karkare was killed by the terrorists. Doubts had unnecessary arisen when A.R. Antulay, Union Minister for Minority Affairs, posed the question: on whose direction did Karkare go towards Cama Hospital when the operation was at the Taj and the Oberoi? Antulay did not realise that the terrorists first went to the Cama Hospital. His remarks created a furore. Muslim clerics on the side of Antulay gave the happenings a communal colour.

What is disconcerting is the attitude of Islamabad which believes that it has no explanation. It has not even dismantled the training camps, a worldwide demand. The whole thing is getting messier.

True, the two countries have to sit across the table to reconstruct the whole attack from beginning to end to see where the fault lies. Weak as Zardari’s government is, it will appear weaker still by not giving the impression that it is its own master. Rhetoric can make it worse.

The writer is a leading journalist in Delhi.

THE PPP was Benazir Bhutto’s party. She was its heart and soul and her assassination left a gaping hole in the party’s fabric, a hole that will not be filled in the foreseeable future. Which is why she is mourned so deeply and, without a doubt, genuinely by anyone even remotely linked to the party.

And which is perhaps why, even a year since her death, the torrent of punditry and analysis has focused on what BB meant to the party rather than what she did for the party.

Savage as the end was, BB’s reign over the PPP lasted more than two decades — a reign book-ended by two historic returns from exile: the first in April 1986; the second barely two months before her death. For the 41-year-old PPP, she was its leader for more than half its existence, and nearly two-thirds if you count the years she was at her mother’s side after ZAB was jailed by Zia.

The party the young Benazir inherited was not the one the two-time prime minister left behind. It couldn’t be the same, such was the span of time involved. But how did the PPP change?

In at least two important ways, Benazir broke from the core of her father’s vision.

First, she rejected her father’s economic platform, dragging the PPP from the pro-nationalisation, government-in-the-productive-sector camp to a more centrist position.

ZAB was no socialist, as any disillusioned diehard in the original PPP cadre will testify. Land reforms were the big issue for Pakistan’s left, but Bhutto was never serious. When little headway was made in the reforms he announced in March 1972, ZAB responded by simply announcing further reforms in 1977. The latter were subsequently shelved by Zia.

ZAB’s signature economic policy was nationalisation. With the Economic Reform Order of Jan 3, 1972 Bhutto set out to remake the economy. In the first round, large-scale manufacturing and the power, oil and gas sectors were scooped up. In 1974, the banking and insurance sectors were added. More nationalisation in 1976 brought flour, rice and vegetable ghee mills and cotton ginning factories into the public sector.

Nationalisation defined the ZAB era. BB turned her back on it.

In December 1988, barely three weeks after her election, Benazir assented to the first structural adjustment facility with the IMF. The facility had been negotiated by the caretaker finance minister, Mahbubul Haq, and Bhutto’s endorsement was arguably only a matter of form. But from the PPP’s perspective it was a decisive break from the past.

In both stints as prime minister, Benazir aggressively pushed privatisation. The first time she tried to divest the government’s holdings in everything from PIA to MCB to the Sui gas corporations. In her second stint, she pushed the PPP’s flagship energy policy which emphasised privately owned Independent Power Projects.

The fact is, BB wasn’t the first to embrace privatisation. The Zia regime had been a proponent. And after her, Nawaz Sharif was equally committed. But by bringing her PPP on board, Benazir ended up forging a vital national consensus on the state’s basic economic model. Since the economy has been botched by all governments, it’s difficult to discern the benefit of continuity in economic policies since the mid-1980s. But flipping the issue around throws it into sharp relief.

Imagine if with every change of government the policy on state ownership changed. Privatisation, nationalisation, privatisation, nationalisation — more than a couple of rounds in quick succession and Pakistan would have been a certifiable basket case.

BB’s rejection of her father’s economics helped Pakistan. It can be argued that she didn’t have a choice, that by the late 1980s the tide had already turned against nationalisation globally. But the fact remains that she not only accepted the change, she pursued it vigorously.

The younger Bhutto’s second big shift was on the PPP’s posture towards India. ZAB loved to play to the gallery and nothing roused the public like a dose of nationalistic chest-thumping. Bhutto senior was one of the great exponents of modern-day India-bashing, epitomised by his vow to fight a “thousand-year war” against India. But he went beyond words.

Who counselled war against India to Ayub in 1965 is still unclear. Ex-post-facto explanations are usually exculpatory (Ayub blamed Bhutto). But this much we do know: then foreign minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was no shrinking violet when it came to going toe-to-toe with India.

And then there was ZAB’s legendary determination to build a nuclear weapons programme to match India’s. As early as 1965, Bhutto famously threatened that Pakistanis would “eat grass or leaves, even go hungry” to get the bomb if India got one. When India conducted a ‘peaceful nuclear explosion’ in May 1974, Bhutto swung into action. Enter A.Q. Khan.

According to Zahid Malik, a journalist and obsequious biographer of Khan, when the metallurgist agreed in December 1974 to take charge of uranium enrichment, Bhutto thumped his desk in excitement and swore, “I will see the Hindu [expletive] now.” Apocryphal or not, the story sums up Bhutto’s legend on India.

Benazir softened the national rhetoric against India. Across the border, such a claim may be scoffed at, particularly by those who remember Bhutto’s trip during the 1990 crisis to Pakistan-administered Kashmir, where she recounted her father’s thousand-year-war boast.

But Bhutto was only prime minister for five years, and hadn’t held public office for over a decade before her assassination. In office, she was embattled and surrounded by a suspicious security-state establishment. Out of office, she was an eloquent, and believable, ambassador for peace.

Again, the younger Bhutto’s U-turn on a policy of her father’s became a crucial part of an emerging national consensus (at least by the big civilian players) on better ties with India. In Pakistan’s fiercely contested polity it is remarkable that the two largest parties, the PPP and PML-N, developed similar positions on India. BB didn’t have to (neither did Nawaz for that matter), but she did firmly drag the party away from her father’s hawkishness. In doing so, when — if — the time comes for a durable peace, Pakistan’s electorate will be better prepared to accept it.

In one crucial area, however, Benazir stuck to her father’s script, and in doing so may have terminally damaged the PPP’s electoral prospects. While BB signed off on the era of liberalisation, privatisation and deregulation, she didn’t prepare for its effects. She didn’t update the party’s message to the electorate. The politics were refined, but the party rhetoric wasn’t.

Think ‘PPP’ and which slogan comes to mind? ‘Roti kapra aur makaan’, of course, the slogan filched from the East Pakistan peasant leader, Maulana Bhashani. It has little relevance to a growing urban lower-middle and middle class, especially in Punjab. On the other hand, the PML-N’s business-friendly, conservative politics is tailor-made for the upwardly mobile voter.

Curiously then, as custodian of the PPP, Benazir may have helped the country more than her own party.

cyril.a@gmail.com