Disaster in the making?

Published September 23, 2017
The writer is a former editor of Dawn.
The writer is a former editor of Dawn.

HOW the visionary leadership of this unfortunate security state experiments with the delicately balanced political system in the country in the quest for positive results can only be seen as an unmitigated disaster.

Over the past three decades alone there are multiple examples of this near-suicidal self-harm because key state institutions seem to have an endless appetite for acquiring and exercising power way beyond that visualised by the Constitution.

Military rulers Zia and Musharraf felt so constrained by constitutional provisions in wielding absolute authority that they introduced changes in what should have been a sacrosanct document to meet their individual needs/whims.

History will also judge the superior judiciary harshly for being complicit in these crimes against the nation as in the blink of an eye most of its members became no more than rubber stamps for the power-hungry despots.

Yes, it has become extremely fashionable to condemn civilian politicians for their real and perceived shortcomings and crimes. I don’t advocate any less opprobrium for their follies and crimes of omission and commission where these are real, corruption included. But to heap blame for all of the country’s woes on their shoulders is a travesty not least because over the past three decades, notwithstanding small periods that may qualify as exceptions to the rule, the politicians have been hamstrung by the overpowering presence of other institutions in critical policy areas.

Apart from engineering via military coups, then judicial intervention, which would have been enough of a cause for concern, there have been other attempts also to ensure what Gen Ziaul Haq famously termed ‘positive results’ in elections.

It has become extremely fashionable to condemn politicians for their real and perceived shortcomings and crimes.

Having analysed the general election results of 1970 and 1977 and the various local bodies elections up to the 1988 election, the electoral engineers decided that to stop the march of their despised PPP (with a consistent share of vote at well below 50 per cent) all that was needed was a platform to bring together all whose fragmented vote meant defeat in the first-past-the-poll system.

The result was the IJI which the then head of ISI, Lt-Gen Hamid Gul, later owned up to having created as he felt a huge win for the Benazir Bhutto-led PPP would rock the boat, given that the army had serious reservations about her. These were his words.

While this alliance did deny the PPP a big win, the party nonetheless emerged as the single largest party in the country and staked a claim to power after the 1988 polls. The few days to the formation of the provincial assembly saw a dirty campaign mostly fanning parochialism which tilted the result at least in Punjab in favour of the IJI.

To this day, the reason(s) for the military’s visceral hatred for the PPP isn’t clear as the party founder Zulfikar Ali Bhutto strengthened the institution and modernised it to try and make it into a potent fighting force.

He rehabilitated its shattered image post-December 1971 to the extent that what was a demoralised force then, a mere five to six years later, had no issues with staging a coup against the elected government and later hanging the deposed prime minister after a sham trial.

The Zia years saw systematic patronage of two kinds of elements. One, political forces opposed to the PPP, and two, religious leaders with the latter being drawn into an alliance of sorts through not only the so-called Islamisation programme but also to fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan.

It bears no repetition that the success of the so-called Mujahideen in Afghanistan then served as a prototype for similar ‘low-cost, high-yield’ groups elsewhere and was made into a tool of attaining foreign and security policy objectives.

With the changed global environment today when it is getting more and more difficult to use non-state actors as pawns of official policy, there seems to be an equally disastrous desire to ‘mainstream’ such elements in the country’s politics.

This desire may well be prompted by the security establishment’s assessment that it cannot take on these well-trained and armed and, perhaps more significantly, heavily indoctrinated cadres. But who knows, there might be other considerations.

In terms of civil-military relations, the situation may have come full circle from when a Nawaz Sharif-led grouping was introduced to halt the PPP’s march into power. Today, the security establishment seems to harbour similar fears of the Nawaz Sharif-led PML-N.

Hence, a new strategy (or a remarkable coincidence?) that the IJI model is being deconstructed with not just the militant Ahle Hadith and Deobandi groups being mainstreamed as separate political entities but the more militant Barelvi groups being nudged down a similar path too.

Political pundits with far more knowledge of constituency NA-120 have analysed the loss (11 pc) of PML-N’s vote percentage (even though it won the by-election) compared to the last general election. Admittedly, this was in a reduced turnout as is the norm for by-elections.

But to me, the PML-N’s lost percentage equalling the cumulative percentage of the two candidates backed by militant Ahle Hadith and Barelvi parties is significant.

You would be justified in asking what problem I have with the mainstreaming of militant religious groups. Well, none if they agreed to renounce violence, to decommission their weapons and strictly adhere to the electoral code of conduct.

But will they? There is so far no evidence of even one of their members giving up arms. Also the political rhetoric of the militant Barelvis who have raised governor Salman Taseer’s executed murderer to the status of a martyr is alarming to say the least.

If the mainstreaming project was about making democrats of militants it would be a laudable objective but if it means mainstreaming hate, sectarianism and intolerance then Pakistan will certainly be staring at another disaster soon.

The writer is a former editor of Dawn.

abbas.nasir@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, September 23rd, 2017

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