Beware the motivated bluster

PREDICTABILITY in politics: too much of it tends to promote apathy and popular disengagement; too little, on the other hand, can become a recipe for chaos. Sometimes, albeit rarely, a balance can be struck whereby what’s predictable proves reassuring, while there are just enough surprises to offset any sense of mundanity.

The pattern of politics in Pakistan seldom falls in that category. Although the ongoing tussle between the government and the opposition does incorporate elements of uncertainty, the jostling for advantage is, on the whole, a fairly banal process. Reaching conclusions about where it will lead involves a certain amount of guesswork, but the past suggests that optimism can safely be edited out of the equation.

A comparable miasma engulfs Pakistan’s relations with India. The hopes raised in recent months, in the wake of relatively conciliatory statements and steps from both sides, now need to be rescued from underneath the rubble of last week’s murderous bomb blasts in Mumbai.

The attacks weren’t exactly predictable, but the same could not be said about New Delhi’s reaction to the twin outrage. Well before substantial evidence pointing to the identity of the perpetrators could conceivably have been collated, fingers were being pointed in Pakistan‘s direction — most notably by the deputy prime minister, Lal Krishna Advani.

The subcontinental blame game often gives the impression of being a reciprocal arrangement. Unexplained explosions or other instances of apparently random violence in Pakistan are usually blamed, at least semi-officially, on a “foreign hand”. New Delhi responds in kind, and Congress administrations were as prone to knee-jerk reactions of this sort as the present Bharatiya Janata Party-led government.

If the allegations carry a certain cachet even when they are not grounded in logic or common sense, that’s because both Pakistan and India have in the past not been averse to promoting destabilization across the border.

Past follies do not, of course, by themselves justify the extrapolation that official Pakistani agencies were behind the bizarre assault on India’s parliament in December 2001 or last month‘s taxi-bombs at the Gateway of India and Zaveri Bazar in Mumbai. Nor is there any reason to believe that terrorist attacks in Quetta, for example, bear the RAW imprimatur. Yet many people — too many, perhaps — take such charges seriously because they are bolstered by the weight of experience.

At the same time, the finger-pointing exercises detract from combating home-grown terrorists, of which there is no dearth in India or Pakistan.

The explosions in Mumbai came just hours after an archaeological survey concluded that there was indeed evidence that the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya was constructed on the ruins of a Hindu temple. That’s a dubious finding, not least because the committee that reached it is believed to have been stacked by the BJP, which has also sought in various ways to rewrite the history of India.

It’s worth recalling that even the most fundamentalist of the Great Mughals, namely Aurangzeb, had no qualms about his armed forces being led by Hindu generals. But even if it is true that a temple was levelled so that a mosque could be erected on the site, is there anything to be gained from repeating his folly?

If the blasts were indeed a response to the Ayodhya finding, one can only marvel at their promptness. An alternative scenario suggests that they may have been a response to last year’s anti-Muslim pogroms in Gujarat. But even that conclusion is based on conjecture. What is less disputable is that the terrorist acts — counting on the predictability of the reaction — were designed to vitiate relations between the Hindu and Muslim communities - and, by extension, to freeze the Indo-Pakistan thaw.

Although the bombs do not, on the face of it, appear to have been aimed exclusively at members of the Hindu community, even the most generous explanations involve the assumption that they were planted by Muslim extremists. Even so, the press offered interesting variations on the theme.

The Hindu, for example, said in an editorial that Mumbai “has suffered the consequences of communal politics before. The serial bombings of 1993 ... were carried out by mafia elements backed by Pakistan’s intelligence services. Yet members of the mafia acted as they did only after the city had witnessed an unprecedented communal pogrom. While millions of ordinary Muslims completely reject and condemn such ‘retaliatory’ terrorism, the fact remains that hatred breeds hatred....

“For the carnage we are now witnessing, politicians who have built their careers on hate must, in the final analysis, be held to account.”

It pointed a finger, in other words, not so much at Pakistan as at the BJP, not least at Gujarat’s chief minister Narendra Modi, who recently attracted protests in London when he took his fundamentalist campaign to Wembley. “His decision to fly to Britain,” Luke Harding wrote in The Observer, “suggests he is preparing to launch himself on the national Indian stage, with some pundits tipping him as a future Indian prime minister. If he ever makes it, then India’s tradition of secular democracy, which has been under threat for some time, will have been replaced by something much darker.”

Meanwhile, New York’s Wall Street Journal, which has become a mouthpiece for the neo-conservative right in the US, offered an unusual take on the carnage in Mumbai. “The fight against terrorism is global,” it commented. “That’s a lesson that doesn’t yet seem to have fully hit home in India, judging from New Delhi’s recent rejection of a US request to send 15,000 troops to help restore order and combat terrorism in Iraq ... The US has driven a wedge into the centre of Muslim terrorism with its occupation of Iraq, and it is looking to see who its friends really are. One good anti-terror turn will deserve another.”

It is quite remarkable that utter nonsense of this variety finds its way into newspapers regarded as “prestigious”. Far from driving a wedge into its centre, the US occupation of Iraq has served as an incitement to Islamic terrorism.

As in Israel and the Occupied Territories, the terror works both ways, of course: it consists not only of attacks from unidentified sources on the occupation forces and what could be construed as related targets, but also of the violence and coercion deployed by the invaders to keep an increasingly disenchanted local population in check.

The Journal also fails to note that collaboration with the empire-builders has brought little domestic benefit to Tony Blair, who last week became only the second British prime minister to have to testify before a public inquiry. The first was his predecessor John Major, whose testimony, ironically, involved responding to allegations that successive Conservative administrations had turned a blind eye to the export of weapons to Iraq.

Blair’s bland deposition before the Hutton inquiry did little to dissipate the cloud that hangs over his government’s unrelenting but ultimately unsuccessful efforts to build an iron-clad case for the invasion of Iraq. The day after his testimony, Blair’s communications director Alastair Campbell, who has been at the centre of allegations that No.10 Downing Street played a key role in hyping up Britain’s dossiers on the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s regime, announced his resignation.

The fact that both of Blair’s closest aides (the other one was Peter Mandelson) have been compelled to quit during his stint in office speaks for itself. Yet, although the majority of Britons appear to accept that Blair and his ministers lied repeatedly in the service of George W. Bush’s concocted case for war, the prime minister remains entrenched, thanks in large part to an ineffective opposition.

Dubya himself is a beneficiary of the same phenomenon; although his poll ratings have lately been sliding, the support has not thus far been transferred to a Democrat opponent. And with his eyes on November 2004, Bush continues nonchalantly to strangle the truth. Speaking last week to the annual convention of the American Legion, for example, he reiterated the mantra that the US has terrorists on the run, while admitting in the same breath that they “are gathering in Iraq to undermine the advance of freedom”.

That’s predictable enough. Adolf Hitler may have expressed similar emotions while lamenting the resistance attracted by the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia or France. But Bush is in exceptionally dangerous territory in claiming that “Al Qaeda and the other global terror networks recognize that the defeat of Saddam Hussein’s regime is a defeat for them” — because he may actually believe that reversal of the truth.

Luckily, the US is not entirely bereft of saner voices. On the day that Bush’s comments appeared in The New York Times, the paper also carried a comment by Maureen O’Dowd excoriating the “strutting, omniscient Bush administration” for its refusal “to address the possibility that our seizure of Iraq has left us more vulnerable to terrorists”. A week earlier, writing in the same newspaper, Jessica Stern cited the attack on the UN headquarters in Baghdad as “the latest evidence that America has taken a country that was not a terrorist threat and turned it into one”. The question is, can such voices make themselves heard above the neo-con cacophony before the uber-hawks strike again?

mahir59ali@netscape.net

The deepening quagmire

THE tragic bombing of the sacred shrine — the mosque of Hazrat Ali — in Najaf on Friday last, was perhaps the most significant manifestation of the growing insecurity in Iraq and perhaps the most significant success so far achieved by the remnants of the Saddam regime. The attack, which killed scores of Iraqis, including prominent cleric Ayatollah Muhammad Baqer al-Hakim — and which came less than a week after a bomb went off at the home of Mr. Hakim’s uncle, Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Said al-Hakim — has convulsed the Shia community.

It followed close on the heels of the bombing of the UN headquarters in which the secretary general’s representative, Mr. Sergio De Mello, along with a large number of other UN workers were killed, and an attack on the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad earlier in the month. Forensic evidence has apparently been found suggesting that the same explosive material and the same method was used in fabricating the devices that ravaged the Jordanian embassy, the UN’s Baghdad headquarters and the mosque in Najaf.

Where does the finger of suspicion point? According to western press reports based on analyses by “terrorism experts”, the on-the-spot reporters and official press briefings, it is believed that while offering only token resistance to the invading American forces, Saddam had made elaborate plans for a post-occupation harassment of the American forces and the reduction of the country to a state of chaos.

Saddam had drawn from the Iraqi central bank a few days before the collapse of the regime some $1 or $1.2 billion in cash and part of this money is now being used to finance the activities of Saddam loyalists from the old intelligence network, the army and Tikritis and, most importantly, buying or acquiring the services of free-lance mercenaries or extremists from the Islamic world.

Jason Burke of the Guardian, for example, surmises that even while Saddam diehards may have arranged the attack on the UN headquarters the driver of the explosive packed vehicle, who also died in the attack was probably an Islamic militant. President Bush, on August 22 making his first appraisal of the Iraqi situation after the bombing of the UN building, said the persistent killings, which have included U.S. military personnel, Iraqis and dozens of United Nations relief workers, are the combined work of former Baath Party officials loyal to Hussein and “Al Qaeda-type fighters” who are infiltrating the country. Others believe that given the Saddam regime’s antipathy towards the extremists it could be the extremists who have been able to enter Iraq from across unsecured borders and may have acted on their own or in unison with local sympathisers who, possibly had no connection with Saddam. Addressing the same subject on the same day on Al-Jazeera TV in Qatar, US deputy secretary Armitage said that “the borders (of Iraq) are quite porous, as you’d imagine, and the fact that we’ve captured a certain number of foreign fighters in Baghdad and around Iraq indicates that the ways that these people are getting into the country is from Iran and from Syria and from Saudi Arabia”.

While he could not fix the blame for the ingress on any of these countries, he said: “but, at a minimum, I can state that these fighters are not being stopped at the borders, and this is something that causes us a great deal of concern.” He went on to add, “I must say that post-May 12th, and the horrible bombing and terrorist attack in Riyadh, I think the Saudi government has had a renewed effort to try to bring extremism under control because they realize that those who perpetrated the bombing in Riyadh are as intent on harming the people of Saudi Arabia as they are in attacking American or foreign interests”.

Infiltration from Saudi Arabia has however been a hot topic. There were reports that more than 3,000 Saudis had slipped into Iraq to fight the Americans. Most experts tended to dismiss this report as exaggerated but maintained that some hundreds of foreign militants had entered Iraq. They held the American forces responsible for not according top priority to the securing of the frontiers.

After the Najaf blast the first report to the AP news agency, from the Iraqi police, responsible for the investigation stated that 19 men had been arrested, that many of them were Saudis, that all of them belonged to the Wahabi sect, and that all of them had Al Qaeda connections. The Saudis have denied these reports pointing out that while there has been talk of Saudi infiltrators no solid evidence has been presented. The Americans too have said nothing to confirm the AP report but it became the basis for some further “analytical reports” on the role of the jihadi elements, whether they were part of the Al Qaeda or not.

A London based analyst points out that Islamic web sites around the world are already featuring Iraq as the focal point of a jihad or holy war against the United States and that the appeals for jihadists to travel to Iraq are reminiscent in some ways of the campaign two decades ago to recruit Islamic Mujahideen guerrillas to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. He believes that “If the security situation does not quickly improve in Iraq, the country could soon become a paradise for jihad,”...You have all the ingredients for chaos: a lawless state in which anti-American feeling is growing, a country without armed forces, a country divided between Sunni and Shia”.

The most important and potentially most dangerous for Iraq as much as for the occupation forces is the possibility that this was the work of a Shia group that was opposed to Ayatollah Baqer Hakim and the policy of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) to cooperate with the Americans and to be part of the Iraqi governing council.

Moqtada al-Sadr, the fiery heir of Ayatollah Sadr, who was said to have been Iraq’s equivalent of Imam Khomeini and who was killed by Saddam Hussain in 1980, is using the undoubted support he enjoys among some of the poorer Shias to seek a change in the general policy of the Shia religious leaders to acquiesce in the American occupation. He has control of a whole township in Baghdad, formerly known as Saddam City and now renamed “Sadr City”, populated almost entirely by less affluent Shias. He recently extracted an apology from the Americans for the desecration of a banner bearing the Holy Prophet’s name but deemed it insufficient and demanded that there be no American presence in Sadr City.

He is suspected of having played a part in the assassination, shortly after Saddam’s fall, of Ayatollah Khoie — the heir of the late Ayatollah Uzma Khoie, who had returned to Iraq after years of exile in London and who was said to have developed close ties with the British leaders including Prime Minister Blair during his stay in London. The alleged motive was that since Khoie’s religious lineage was even more distinguished than that of Sadr his message of moderation would carry greater weight with the Shia masses.

Ayatollah Baqer Al-Hakim was undoubtedly the best interlocutor that the Americans could have found for cementing their relationship with the Shias in Iraq. The Shias hated Saddam and welcomed his removal but they were suspicious of American motives and these suspicions were only strengthened when security and economic conditions took a nosedive after the American occupation. If Shia restiveness was kept under partial control it was attributable in large part to the influence of Ayatollah Hakim and to the backing that he had from the Ayatollah Uzmas of the “Howza” including the senior-most of them all, Ayatollah Uzma Sistani.

Ayatollah Hakim, when he returned from exile in Iran, brought with him the “Badr” said to number more than 10,000 fighters. This strength, as much as the backing the Howza has given the SCIRI, and the danger of taking on the Americans may give pause to Sadr in his bid for leadership of the Shias on the platform of throwing the Americans out and getting the Shias the major share of power in Iraq. But this is by no means certain. The frustration among the people in Iraq generally and among the Shias in particular is extremely high. The known plans of the Americans are not such as to offer the hope of a quick solution to the problems with which the Iraqis are beset. Sadr may well become the vehicle for the expression of this frustration.

There is now, in my view, a clear divide among the Iraqi Shias. Whether this will erupt into open conflict is not clear but it is nonetheless a dangerous overlay to the existing ethnic divides that already exist in Iraq and which are being exacerbated by the economic difficulties. An already dangerous Iraq has become much more so.

The idea for a UN force under a US commander has now been floated. It has received an endorsement of sorts from the Russians. Whether there will be a UN Security Council decision that permits this to go forward is not yet known but what is known is that there will be increased pressure on Pakistan and Turkey to provide troops for Iraq and to accept whatever little cover a UN Security Council decision provides.

It is a decision that will have to be weighed carefully. On the one hand there is the enormous boost it will provide to our relations with the US and with the West generally. On the other there is the question not only of public opinion in Pakistan but also the question of the reception our forces will be accorded by the Iraqis. Most important of all is the question of how the sectarian divide in Iraq will impinge on the sensitivities of our own multi-sectarian army.

The writer is a former foreign secretary of Pakistan.

Dying to eat

IN a month or so the wedding season will start. All of us can’t get married, so for most of us the season means eating rich food day and night. Marriage receptions, valimas, mehndis, and the like are all there to enable us to tuck in, to have our fill and more, notwithstanding the government’s restrictions on serving food on such occasions, or the doctors’ advice not to overeat.

It is just like Ramzan, the annual bash in which Muslims forget the spiritual aspects of the month and concentrate on their gormandizing faculties. Weddings and Ramzan always make my imagination conjure up likely happenings. For instance, look at this: “Seth Ghulam Shikam, the well-known hardware merchant, who suffered a stroke after over-eating at a wedding reception last night, has been admitted to hospital. As attempts to pump out his stomach failed, minor surgery had to be resorted to in order to relieve his distress.”

If a story of this sort did appear in the newspapers one morning, you would not be astonished. If you knew Seth Ghulam Shikam you would only be surprised how he managed to avoid this stroke for so long. It should have come much earlier, the way he was going about it.

You must be acquainted with the word nadeeda. It is actually the Persian word na-deeda, slightly mispronounced in its Punjabi and Urdu version, and has acquired a sense all its own. For us it means a person who pounces on food like a hawk and gobbles it up like a pig. I think we are a nation of nadeedas, and that goes more for the rich than the deprived poor.

One would have thought that the well-to-do had reached the stage of satiety. That with so much available to eat, and with such a large variety to choose from, they would look at lunch and dinner as a routine necessity to keep body and soul together and not as a hobby, even a vocation, whose practice is eagerly awaited at all times of the day and night. But it is not so.

Look in at any wedding meal. If you are a guest yourself your attention will naturally be riveted on the food in front of you. But if you can bear to draw it away for a moment, see how people pile up their plates with pulao, and top up the pile with a huge piece of chicken, as if it is The Last Supper. A naan will be held tight in one hand, ready to be eaten when the rice no longer makes the mouth water. As if there are going to be no naans in the world after this meal. Well, safety first I suppose.

I shall never forget a garden party that I witnessed in the early sixties in the Governor’s House, Lahore. The host was the redoubtable Nawab of Kalabagh and the guests were a couple of thousand newly elected members of basic democracies. They were all gathered on a big lawn with the Governor, while the tables were laid out on another lawn.

As soon as food was announced, the honourable guests rushed on to the other lawn like cattle in stampede, jumping over two hedges in the process. One of them even lost his dhoti, his tehmad, when it stuck in the hedge. I swear it’s true. And within seven minutes all the tables had been swept clean of everything that even remotely resembled an eatable.

If you were acquainted with the veteran photo-journalist Kamal Hyder, once upon a time of The Pakistan Times, who had later come to live in Islamabad, you could have asked him to show you a film of the scene. He had shot it from the upper verandah of the Governor’s House. Much to the grief of all of us he died a couple of years ago.

During last Ramazan there were two news stories in Lahore newspapers about officially sponsored iftaris in the Punjab capital where the guests ran riot, started eating before iftari time, yes, before the hour of breaking the fast, upset tables and smashed crockery while fighting for food. Such scenes are not confined to the proletariat.

For a long time I was able to officially attend the splendid civic receptions in Lahore’s Shalamar Gardens for visiting royalty and heads of state from friendly countries. They were always beautiful and picturesque occasions. However, in my memory, each one that I attended was marred by people starting to eat before the formal ceremony was over and tea was served. And the guests at these prestigious receptions were not Tom, Dick and Harry, but ministers, senior government officers, and so-called prominent citizens.

You can further confirm my observations if you happen to attend a dinner given by any millionaire for his millionaire friends. Ten to one, the sallies that precede the serving of food will consist of the friends teasing one another with not having had breakfast and lunch in preparation for the party, or recounting how some of them had eaten so much at some other party that they suffered the fate I have conjectured for Seth Ghulam Shikam.

Harmless banter, you will say. But it is symptomatic of the national hobby. It goes on during the meal too, with pals quizzing each other about how they’ve eaten fit for four. I’ve never been abroad, but I’m sure many of my readers have. I wonder if the British or the American rich also talk in a similar vein about food.

It seems that we are a perennially hungry people. Each meal, or an occasion to eat, is momentous with us, something to be looked forward to with excitement and remembered afterwards with nostalgia. Long after the taste and the aroma are gone, the memory lingers. And just like chewing the cud, we fish out the remembrance from the recesses of our minds and savour the various dishes again and again.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to give you a homily on the subject or pontificate on the merits of continence and forbearance with food or on eating manners. As a good trencherman you are not supposed to be deterred by silly observations like mine — Food is for eating, and eating with gusto.

So, don’t mind. Just roll up your sleeves and dive into the gravy for a nice bit of meat. And never think of Seth Ghulam Shikam while you are doing it. Even if he kicks the bucket in hospital, it will be said about him that he died in a good case, and with his boots on!

‘Hateful Patriot Act’

THE American Civil Liberties Union detests the USA Patriot Act. But with some Republican members of Congress also deploring civil liberties rollbacks, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft is on the road to talk up the law he credits for his department’s victories in the war on terror.

Ashcroft insists, “If we knew then what we know now, we would have passed the Patriot Act six months before Sept. 11, not six weeks after.” But the attorney general has yet to prove that to the satisfaction of many lawmakers who voted for the bill but can’t get good answers about how he’s used his broad new authority to spy, detain and prosecute.

Ashcroft’s three-week, 18-city tour — what one critic knocks as a “charm offensive” — is a public-relations retort to growing concern that Congress went too far, too fast in the terrible weeks after the 9/11 attacks.

Ashcroft may also be laying the groundwork for a sequel to the Patriot Act that would steal away still more liberties. Congress should resist new laws and instead trim the overly broad authority it too hurriedly gave law enforcement.

More than 140 towns and cities nationwide and three states approved resolutions denouncing the Patriot Act. Librarians and booksellers are especially outraged by provisions that widen the FBI’s power to monitor people’s reading and video-watching habits.

Other groups condemn provisions for secret searches and the government’s expanded power to snoop into e-mail and the Internet. All of this new authority may also be used to investigate crimes unrelated to terrorism.

Second thoughts by members of Congress have already resulted in some action. Last month, the House overwhelmingly passed a measure that would repeal investigators’ power to do “sneak and peek” probes — unannounced searches of homes and businesses.

The nation shares Ashcroft’s relief that another major terrorist attack has not occurred.

— Los Angeles Times

The state of our democracy

THE current tussle in Islamabad on the Legal Framework Order has left the people in a state of bewilderment. The common man perceives the happenings in the federal capital as a struggle for power between the elite groups with none of them having any concern for the welfare of the masses.

Be it the men in uniform, the ruling party or those in the opposition, all of them have managed to project an image of themselves that hardly endears them to the multitude. This depoliticization of the people is the price we have had to pay for the destruction of democracy over the years both by the military and the political leaders. We have reached a stage where even the intellectuals can’t agree on the definition of democracy. If one were asked to describe the attributes of a democratic state we may not even be able to come up with a consensus.

Going by how the issue is debated by the intelligentsia, the key requisites would appear to be a representative government installed through fair and free elections and freedom of speech, assembly, and association. All this supposedly facilitates self-government, which should be the ultimate aim of a democratic order if we are to pre-empt the exploitation of the masses by the rulers. John Strachey, the British Labour Party leader whose brilliant lectures on democracy were published in a pamphlet titled The Challenge of Democracy after his death, pointed out that there is no substitute for self-government. Government by somebody else always, in the end, turns into government in the interests of somebody else, he succinctly pointed out.

In that context, Pakistan has not made much progress, even though it has all the outward strappings of a constitutional government. What we basically lack is a democratic culture and a system of in-built accountability. This is essential if democracy is to function effectively. The need is to have a system which keeps the powers of the rulers in check and protects the interests of the people.

Hence it is the accountability process which emerges as the key element in the political system. This alone makes the rulers responsible for their action. But for the accountability not to degenerate into a witch hunt, it is essential that it is an ongoing and in-built process which should take place while a ruler is still in office.

This is not something impossible or unheard of. You just have to look around beyond your horizons to see how accountability works in other countries. It can bring a serving prime minister before a judge to testify in a judicial enquiry and defend the veracity of his statement. Had the British democracy not been underpinned with such a strong tradition of accountability, Lord Hutton, the judge deputed to look into the ministry of defence scientist Dr David Kelly’s suicide, could not have summoned Mr Tony Blair and grilled him for over two hours. The implications of the Hutton enquiry will be far-reaching. But before anything else it has established the credentials of Britain’s democracy.

Now have a look at the home front to see how accountability operates in Pakistan. A Greek oil tanker carrying 67,000 tonnes of crude oil is grounded off the Karachi coast. The KPT, the agency ultimately responsible for this accident, shows no concern whatsoever. After 18 days the Tasman Spirit breaks up and begins spilling its oily cargo in the Arabian Sea.

Environmentalists, health professionals and people with an iota common sense had been warning of the oil slick’s disastrous consequences but the government proceeded to underplay the whole incident. Why? Because by making out the accident as being nothing serious, it could absolve itself of the need to pin responsibility.

It took the WHO in conjunction with the health ministry to declare the oil spill a “massive catastrophe”. And still responsibility has not been pinned. Rubbing salt to the wounds of the Karachiites, the government has instituted an enquiry headed by those very same people whose responsibility it was to act in the first place. Will this be a fair enquiry? .

All this is happening when a political structure of sorts is in place in the country. The government is complacent and why should it not be when none of the political parties has pressed for accountability in the matter. Only two party leaders have spoken up. A People’s Party MP, who has asked the government to pay Rs 10 billion as compensation for the damage inflicted, presented her case in such a way that she appeared to be making political capital out of this environmental disaster. How she arrived at the sum of Rs 10 billion we will never know because the party did not carry out an exercise to determine the quantum of the losses. If it did, the public has not been informed about it.

The MMA which is also in the opposition, used the occasion to demand the resignation of the KPT chairman and the federal communications minister. Again the impression one got was that the MMA was out to obtain its pound of flesh. Since no party did its homework it was not in a position to convincingly bring pressure to bear on the government to force it to hold the people accountable. It seems all parties are uncomfortable with the accountability question. It could backfire when they are in office at some future date. They could then become the victim of their own initiative.

It is a pity that our political parties — those in office and those in the opposition — are not working to give democracy roots in the country. If the military has succeeded in perpetuating its hold on power it is because no effort has been made to institutionalize and consolidate strong democratic traditions even when this was possible. This calls for a lot of hard work especially if accountability is to have some credibility and is not to be treated as an instrument of victimization of the opponents.

It is still an exercise worth undertaking even in our kind of democracy. For when a parliamentary system is operated vigorously and with commitment, it can mobilize and involve the people. Thus we have assemblies in place but they are not taken seriously and have become theatres of a political tug of war rather than the august institutions where parliamentarians of calibre test their debating skills and monitor the government’s policies armed with basic information and an intelligent understanding of issues.

If Pakistan is to have democracy what we need are parties which should make human rights, social justice and the rule of law the central plank of their programme. Their goal should be to bring about a change by putting pressure on the government on these issues. Their MPs are, after all, paid for doing this job and it is indefensible behaviour on their part not to put in their appearance in the few sessions that are held and contribute to the debates.

One has just to recall the pre-1989 days when the Berlin Wall was still intact and socialist dictatorships ruled the roost in East European countries. The pro-democracy movements led by the Solidarity in Poland, Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia and the Democratic Opposition in Hungary mobilized the public and ultimately changed the system. True, many other factors also contributed to the fall of autocracy in East Europe but the catalyst role played by these groups cannot be underestimated.

In his pamphlet The Challenge of Democracy, John Strachey wrote that a certain level of civilization was essential for the successful working of democratic institutions. He identified this as “a highly literate and a highly intelligent middle class which participates in public life effectively and actively”.

The hallmark of this middle class is not its spending power but its education and political involvement. How can such a middle class be created without well organized and committed political parties? Until our parties work in that direction the climate and culture for democracy cannot be created.