| June 29, 2007 | Friday | Jamadi-us-Sani 13, 1428 |
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Storming the redoubts of autocracy
A GATHERING of opposition braves in London should cause the rafters and ceilings of Islamabad to shake. But it hasn’t happened so far.
Why not? Because political capital and credibility lost by our opposition parties — by their fecklessness more than anything else — has yet to be retrieved, lost honour yet to be redeemed.
I too will be going to London because, like a long list of others, I have been invited as an observer. Half my heart will be in the journey, half of it, sad to say, perhaps not.
Who doesn’t want these parties to get their act together? Who doesn’t want them to agree on one or two points of such blinding clarity that all confusion is swept away and the nation galvanised to storm the redoubts of Pakistani autocracy? This is an apt hope in or near the month of July when the Bastille was stormed and the French Revolution broke out. Who doesn’t want this to be a ‘defining moment’?
Fond hopes resting on a bed of sand. What will an All Parties Conference be worth if Benazir Bhutto won’t attend? What will such a gathering be worth if that prince of political comedians, Maulana Fazlur Rahman, does attend?
Benazir’s appendages, a posse of whom will be at the conference, are not the same thing as the mistress of the Swiss diamonds (actually bought in London) herself. Musharraf’s acolytes can sometimes think for themselves. Take the case of friend Mushahid who every now and then is driven to sound like a Bolshevik. Benazir acolytes dare not stray even a centimeter from the party line. Even the army allows some difference of opinion, the PPP none at all.
This is one thing (the only thing I must hasten to add) it has in common with that other bastion of democracy, the MQM. Dissidence of any kind in the PPP invites expulsion into the cold. But that’s about it. In the MQM dissidence fetches a higher price. As the slogan painted on many a Karachi high-rise (there’s one as soon as you leave the airport and get on to Sharea Faisal) puts it succinctly, “Quaid ka jo ghaddar hai, maut ka haqdar hai”. (He who betrays the leader is worthy of death.) The Mafia could not have put it better.
But the question of inner-party democracy in the PPP apart, an APC without the shifting Benazir Bhutto (who nowadays shifts quicker than the wind) loses half its meaning. After all, the PPP is the PPP, one of the two biggest parties in the country, the other of course being the PML-N. How do you draw up a grand strategy with the quintessential Daughter of the East absent?
And how do you draw up a grand strategy with that king of political comedy, Maulana Fazlur Rahman, present? Benazir’s absence will make a difference. The Maulana’s presence is almost guaranteed to wreck the APC. Unwitting disciple of Clausewitz, the Maulana never makes a frontal assault. A master of the indirect approach (which is the essence of strategy), he goes with the flow before wreaking what devastation he can from that position of vantage.
One can only sympathise with the PML-N leadership. They want to forge a united front – the need of the hour. But they are contending with two of the slipperiest eels in the political waters of Pakistan. Is this too much scepticism? I hope it is and I hope that from the entrails of the APC something solid and meaningful emerges. But with the Maulana on board and the Empress of the East playing her own games with the quasi-military regime which has been Pakistan’s lot these past nearly eight years, the APC has an uphill job on its hands.
Incidentally, Benazir’s stand that the holy fathers of the MMA should at least withdraw from the Balochistan government (where they are acting as Musharraf allies) if their democratic pretensions are to be taken seriously, has merit. How can the holy fathers be all things to all people – running with the government, hunting with the opposition? Hasn’t their hypocrisy lasted long enough? But getting the Maulanas out of the Balochistan government would be a miracle worthy of biblical times. We are unlikely to see it.
Our political class can test the patience of a saint. Some good men and women are to be found in its ranks, capable of great sacrifice and commitment, adhering to the path of principle in good times and bad. If the worst thing about Pakistan is the cult of authoritarianism, the best thing about it is the tradition of resistance.
The Chile of Pinochet (of horrid memory) had its Pablo Neruda, Nigeria of the generals, of Gen Sani Abacha in particular, its Sole Woyinka (his memoirs, You Must Set Forth At Dawn, is worth several readings). But not many countries can come close to the nostalgia and wistfulness with which our poets have written of freedom and national redemption.
If we have had our dictators – a more sorry and incompetent lot would be hard to find – we have also had dissenting politicians who have not bent before the wind. And we have had our poets – Faiz, the great Faiz, Jalib, Faraz and the rest – who in their verse have celebrated liberty and denounced authoritarianism. This has been one of the good things about our history. It has been the seedbed of brilliant poetry.
But however much we eulogise this culture of resistance, the fact remains that it is outweighed and outdistanced by the culture of conformity, of sucking up to authority. Every dictator finds his willing political collaborators, every dictator finds his Q League. Names change. In Ayub Khan’s time it was the Convention League. Nowadays it is the Q League, the common thread between these different incarnations being the spirit of blind loyalty and subservience.
But Q League stalwarts can at least claim to be honest. They are with the regime, their interests tied to its survival. The regime sinks, they sink or they look for new havens and new godfathers. But opposition parties can often be downright dishonest. Listening to their rhetoric you could mistake it for Leninism. Seeing them in action, or seeing them make a religion of falsehood, you would despair of politics altogether.
What a pity that where the lawyers’ movement has done so much – where it has caused the edifice of power to shake and its denizens to look foolish – it is largely alone, bolstered only by the sympathy and fellow-democratic yearning of the media and of people at large.
The judicial crisis has shaken the political parties out of their torpor, but they still have to straighten out many things. If the APC is to make a difference and chart a new course of action, it will have to forge a united stand on the most important question of all: the charade of a presidential election from the present assemblies. There should be no prevarication on this score. If the generalissimo goes to these assemblies, what will the political parties do? This is the foremost question before them, all other issues being secondary.
The people of Pakistan are not fools. Why wherever he goes is My Lord the Chief Justice showered with rose petals? Why do people, including women and children, wait for hours on end to have a glimpse of him? He addresses no public meetings. The legal and constitutional subjects he chooses to speak on when he addresses bar associations can’t be of much interest to men and women in the street. He has stirred the nation’s sensibility by standing up to a military figure and saying no to his face. By doing so he has written a new history (which is a fact, not hyperbole).
If the APC is to evoke a similar response, if it is not to be a damp squib, if it is to stir the masses to action, if it is to confound the plans for a phoney presidential election, the challenge before it is to show similar courage and honesty. Only then will the promise of this ‘defining moment’ be fulfilled.
