| June 15, 2007 | Friday | Jamadi-ul-Awwal 29, 1428 |
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The great betrayal
FRUSTRATED and now clearly deprived of the power of clear thinking, dictatorship is on the retreat in Pakistan. As it steps back, it is having to perform a slow striptease, its authority and credibility stripped away layer by layer to reveal the startling hollowness inside.
Field Marshal (self-appointed) Ayub Khan’s diaries display nothing so much as his essential shallowness. In them is revealed a very limited man, incapable of a single arresting or original thought. And he ruled Pakistan, as a one-man endeavour, for eleven years. How could Pakistan suffer such a person, who never won much distinction in his military career – the battles he fought and won being largely against his own people – for so long?
A similar question could be asked of Gen Yayha Khan and his given-to-merriment cronies. What was it in Pakistan’s genetic make-up that allowed such clowns not only to preside over Pakistan’s destiny but also ensure the country’s break-up at the hands of India, and the unstoppable force of Bangladeshi nationalism?
If merit and military proficiency had anything to do with it, Zia would never have made it past the rank of brigadier. But he not only was promoted but found himself army chief, on the strength of which he ruled Pakistan for another eleven years. Crafty, devious but again of shallow outlook, he too prompts the question: how could such a person come into the legacy of Iqbal and Jinnah? Was it for the likes of him that Pakistan was founded?
When Gen Pervez Musharraf’s time is up and he steps into the sunset, as all mortals must, about him too it will be asked: how come another limited edition could rule Pakistan for so long? Ayub’s diaries and Musharraf’s ghost-written biography, ‘In the Line of Fire’, may talk about different events but the thinking they reveal is about the same, both books plumbing the same depths of profundity.
Shouldn’t the General Staff admit defeat? If Ayub and his three successors are the best it has been capable of producing, shouldn’t it give up the idea of ‘saving’ this unfortunate country? Saved many times, and to what effect we know too well, it can do with some unsaving.
Will Musharraf step aside or march into the sunset willingly? Don’t count on it for a second. Realising when enough is enough is an exercise General Headquarters is yet to conduct. The ‘golden mean’, the path of moderation between two extremes, thereby avoiding excess of any kind, is a notion lost on our military command. Every military ruler has clung to power until pushed out, kicking and screaming.
Power corrupts? In Pakistan’s case it more likely enfeebles the mind. Ayub towards the end, Yahya when he had presided over the loss of East Pakistan, Zia towards the close of his era after the Junejo assembly and government had been dismissed, and Musharraf after the judicial crisis: testimonials, all of them, to the loss of the power to think clearly.
Will this comic opera survive? Nothing is going right for it, every move running into a roadblock or creating further problems, the hole the regime finds itself in getting bigger. To get an idea of this hole, a glance at the knights defending Musharraf in the Supreme Court is instructive.
Sharifuddin Pirzada has been legal guru to more than one military regime. So his expertise should not be doubted although it should be said of him that he is at his best in cases where the judgment is already pre-determined. He looks uncertain in the present case precisely because the judgment is far from pre-determined. Oh for a bench of one’s choice, the forte at which Pirzada has always excelled.
But to be reduced to Malik Qayyum, once-upon-a-time virtual family judge to the Sharifs (all cases relating to their private concerns and business affairs somehow finding their way to his court…this was when he was judge of the Lahore High Court before, alas, having to step down unceremoniously when caught taking instructions from a Sharif henchman); and Sahibzada Ahmed Raza Khan Kasuri, one of the deadliest loose cannons to have been produced in Pakistan.
Not exactly an embarrassment of legal riches. And for Musharraf not to realise this suggests that he is in more trouble than he thinks.
But consider the miracle occurring. Despite being in such dire straits, his own allies disheartened and not knowing where to turn, Musharraf is receiving covert support from two powerful quarters: Daughter of the East, Benazir Bhutto, and Pakistan’s leading political comedian, Maulana Fazlur Rahman.
PPP spokespersons go blue in the face denying a prospective ‘deal’ with the government but are hard put to explain why the PPP can’t bring itself to say that if Musharraf seeks another five-year term from the present soon-to-be-dead assemblies, its legislators will resign. All they can bring themselves to say is that the PPP will not vote for Musharraf, which is as good as saying that they will stay in the assemblies to lend his ‘election’ credibility.
Maulana Fazlur Rahman too cannot bring himself to say that to thwart Musharraf, the holy fathers of the MMA will quit the assemblies. Goes to show where their heart is and how committed they are to the present movement for the rule of law and the supremacy of the Constitution. Also goes to show how much opposed to Musharraf they truly are. Bhutto won’t admit to anything, being too smart for that, nor would the Maulana. But their studied ambiguity amounts to a betrayal of the present movement.
Look at what the lawyers have done, what they have already achieved: plunged Musharraf into the most serious crisis of his stewardship and shaken his confidence. Look at the issue before the Supreme Court, arguably the most important legal and constitutional case in the nation’s history. Yet Benazir Bhutto and the Maulana (Diesel to his fans), oblivious of the importance of what is at stake, are playing for petty advantage.
They shouldn’t fool themselves, nor should the other political parties. For seven and a half years all that their leaders could do was blab and appear on TV talk shows. If the climate has changed bringing with it the possibility, however remote, of a strengthened judiciary and a slightly chastened military, it is only because of Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry’s defiance and the lawyers’ movement spontaneously arising from his defiance.
Our lawyers have done us proud. No one expected that they would hold out so long. No one thought they would be so steadfast and full of courage. If Benazir Bhutto’s or Maulana Fazlur Rahman’s bargaining position has improved, it is not because of anything smart or brave on their part but again because of the lawyers’ movement.
What the lawyers are doing needs to be strengthened, not sabotaged. This is no time to be cutting deals with a military dispensation in retreat, no time to be coming to its assistance. Sure, Bhutto and the Maulana might have some crumbs thrown their way. But would this be enough compensation for seeing their credibility and standing irretrievably harmed if not destroyed in the eyes of the Pakistani people?
Strange, is it not, that while the two previous movements in our history – 1968-69 and 1977 – were hijacked by ambitious army chiefs, this time the threat of hijacking comes from two political leaders?
They may say they are up to no such thing. But then it is up to them to dispel the doubts raised by their questionable conduct. Why is there so much suspicion about a Benazir Bhutto deal with Musharraf? Why are people disinclined to believe PPP leaders when they try to refute such an impression? Why is there such an inclination to think that Maulana Fazlur Rahman speaks with a forked tongue, saying one thing, meaning another?
And it’s not as if Bhutto and the Maulana can rescue Musharraf. His circumstances now hinge upon just one item of (irrational) ambition: another five-year term as president. But if Musharraf is reduced to Malik Qayyum and Raza Kasuri in the Supreme Court, he should know that the stars are no longer aligned in his favour.
No one, not even I suspect, the dispirited cadres of the Q League, are in a mood to oblige him, professional politicos instinctively aware when the sun is setting or a ship sinking. To get what he wants Musharraf will have to roll out the tanks. But the time for that too may have passed. How to unseat civilian authority is a lesson the army knows by heart. It is very good at it. What it has yet to do is bail out, or prop up, an increasingly obvious liability.
