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This 14th of August will be a crimson birthday for our country.
Crimson, from the colour of the blood of all those — guilty and innocent alike — who have been killed during the Zarb-i-Azb campaign in Waziristan.
Crimson, from the wounds of those slaughtered in the streets of our cities because certain political parties cannot control their ambitions.
Celebrations on both sides of the border will attract a comparison
Crimson, from the embarrassment a chief minister must feel at being unable to allow a political demonstration in his provincial capital to go unthwarted.
Crimson, from the anger 10 million Lahoris at being quarantined like internees in Gaza, and at their entry and exit being blocked by a steel wall of containers.
Crimson, from the shame a governor of the province should feel at barricading himself behind two containers emblazoned with the unwitting admission: “Allah O Akbar”.
Crimson, from the creeping realisation Imran Khan must feel that he has now cohabited with the very two parties — Tahirul Qadri’s PAT and the PML-Q — that he arrogantly refused to espouse in January 2013.
Crimson, from the remonstrance expressed by a London-based political leader that the solution to our political ills lay in the removal of the prime minister, a ‘minus-one’ formula. It is as impious a hope as the suggestion (in another context, almost 2,000 ago) that ‘one man should die for the people, instead of the whole nation being destroyed’.
Crimson, from the self-consciousness the prime minister ought to feel at neglecting governance and instead pursuing stubbornly a personal vendetta against one man — former president Gen Pervez Musharraf.
Crimson, from the mood of a nation that is being made to learn that even though we may be winning the war against terror in Waziristan, we are losing the battle against error in the streets and alleys of the rest of our country.
Crimson, from the stain on our national self-respect that allows us to accept that invocation of Article 245 of the Constitution is justified, that it can be used in Islamabad to protect a civilian government which last year won an electoral endorsement by 15 million voters, and within a year has lost the confidence of the 180 million Pakistanis.
Inevitably, celebrations this August on both sides of the border will attract a comparison. In New Delhi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is gripped by the dilemma whether or not on Independence Day he should award the Bharat Ratna to his mentor Atal Behari Vajpayee and/or to Neta-ji Subhas Chandra Bose. In Islamabad, prime minister Nawaz Sharif will be wondering whether he will be given a reprieve by his opponents or the boot.
To anyone who follows the convulsions inherent in Pakistani politics, there is no possibility of Nawaz Sharif quitting the prime ministership voluntarily. As a third-term prime minister, he is unlikely to commit political suicide, even if there is always the compensation of relapsing into the purgatory of Saudi Arabia.
Nawaz Sharif cannot be coerced into a resignation. He has received an oxygen endorsement from Mr Asif Zardari who has announced that he would like to see Mr Sharif complete his tenure.
Mr Zardari has two reasons for saying this — firstly, he is returning the favour by which Mr Sharif’s cooperation enabled him to complete a full-term as president, and secondly he would relish seeing Mr Sharif sink deeper and deeper into the quicksands of inept governance. Nothing succeeds like the failure of a political opponent.
There are some with long memories who rummage for a comparison in the confrontation between Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and the Pakistan National Alliance following the bitterly contested verdict of the general elections in 1977. The similarities were too superficial to be relived.
Then, the public believed Mr Bhutto had rigged the elections to an unconscionable degree. Today, the public has yet to be convinced (Imran Khan’s dramatic but inconsistent advocacy notwithstanding) that Nawaz Sharif is guilty of rigging on a mass scale. A constituency here, a constituency there perhaps, but too few and, in any case, too long ago. The cement of history has already set.
Almost a century ago, a revolution — the sort Imran Khan and Tahirul Qadri would like to father here — began in Russia. The moderate Social Democratic Party worked with the Bolsheviks to oppose the Czarist monarchy.
Once czar Nicholas II and his cronies had been overthrown, the allies fell out among themselves and the Bolsheviks took control. Trotsky, speaking for the disappointed Mensheviks, railed against his former allies: “You are miserable isolated individuals. You are bankrupt. You have played out your role. Go where you belong — to the dust heap of history.”
A disenchanted, disappointed Pakistani public would be forgiven for hurling similar invective against its political leaders on this crimson 14th of August.
The writer is an author and art historian.
Published in Dawn, August 14th, 2014
