ON August 11, 1947, three days before the flag of Pakistan was unfurled, our sole statesman, founder and maker of Pakistan, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, told the members of his Constituent Assembly that “the first duty of a government is to maintain law and order so that the life, property and religious beliefs of its subjects are fully protected by the state.”
Why has no government of Pakistan heeded this? In all cases it has been lack of will, incompetence, inability, but overriding all has been dishonesty of purpose. Laws have not been enforced, but they have for ever been changed to suit the convenience of the powers of the day so as to prolong its stay in office. :
Who now has convinced our President General Pervez Musharraf that it is the wrapper — the clothes and not the naked body they cover — that counts? Who are his ‘image’ makers? His Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, coupled with Nilofer Bakhtiar who advises him on ‘women’s affairs’, ebullient spokesman on all affairs Sheikh Rashid, coalition partner Gujrat Chaudhry, the governor of Sindh and his British controller?
Prime Minister Aziz’s men can fudge figures as they may, but the cold fact remains that this country now has a population of 160 million, the majority of whom are deprived of potable water. On June 24, attending a mass-marriage, the president informed those gathered that by 2008 every citizen of Pakistan will be provided with potable water. Questions: how does he propose to do this? And how does the growing majority survive until then on the disease-ridden water which is all it now has?
Travel is the name of the game for this government. Prime Minister Aziz started off by taking 49 freeloaders with him on the obligatory Umra trip, he then followed this up by trips to 14 countries within the space of 22 days (this achieved by March of this year according to his minister of state for tourism), and then badly fluffed-up by taking with him to Singapore 70-odd fellow travellers. Good for Singapore, it has things in perspective. Aziz was rebuffed and was told that he plus ten were all who would be welcomed as guests.
The president made a foray to South America. Was this journey really necessary? And who was it who advised him to visit Australia and New Zealand with an entourage of 55 (having first dispatched to the Antipodes his foreign minister as a herald)? In New Zealand the troupe was confined to Auckland as no accommodation was available for a delegation of that size in Wellington, the capital. It was all booked up by the visiting British rugby union team.
When it comes to lack of thought and sensitivity, there is little that can beat the reactions of the men and women appointed by President Musharraf to further his plan to spread amongst the masses his policy of ‘enlightened moderation’. How he hopes to do this with the man/womenpower he has at his disposal, which exhibits a sorry lack of both enlightenment and moderation, is far from self-evident. Despite the fact that the general rightly let the buck stop with him, and declared from New Zealand that it was he who had issued whatever orders had been issued, the Mukhtaran Mai mismanagement and bungle is still with us, the rebound from all the adverse publicity in the international media has not gone away. The ‘image’ has further tumbled.
Three highly uncomplimentary Nicolas Kristof columns (not to Pakistan which he writes is one of the most hospitable countries he has visited, but to the general’s regime) in the New York Times within the space of one week have not helped, neither has the June 22 Jim Hoagland column in the Washington Post (to quote : “Pakistan is the ultimate hard case for US strategy.... Getting Pakistan to face and change its own grim reality should be an urgent American priority”).
In Kristof’s last column of June 21 he refers to the general’s visit to New Zealand where “he was battered by questions about why he persecuted a rape victim forcing him to cancel interviews.” The visit began inauspiciously — the opening sentence of the TV newsreader on the day of his arrival “Got any guns on you, General?” referring to the fluff-up by his bodyguards with their firearms. It was termed a ‘controversial’ visit, because of the ‘atrocious record’ of Pakistan’s human rights situation which is of ‘international concern.’
He did give one television interview to John Campbell who, when introducing him, stated that he knew little about Pakistan and the general when he took over the country in 1999 and thought him to be both an ‘opportunist and a bully.’ However, subsequently after having read of how Musharraf had tackled Pakistan’s problems and done much to improve the country’s economy, he had changed his mind. (He gave a rather apt description of the booted out Nawaz Sharif : ‘He was a nit, arrogant, and corrupt.’)
Campbell asked why it was that Musharraf was so sure he and his rule are the answers to Pakistan’s problems. It is all about democracy, said the general. Democracy as understood in the West has not matured, it has not been allowed to mature, it has been kept dysfunctional by those who ruled in the name of democracy from 1988 to 1999. What is ‘national interest’? Campbell then asked. Hedging a bit on that one, the general’s reply was that he had his finger on the pulse of Pakistan.
He agreed that there were fundamentalist elements, angry and violent, but that they were a mere small minority. His wish is that the ‘dormant majority’ (as he termed most of us) should be bold enough to stand up and be counted. He explained how after 1979 and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the US armed and equipped first the Mujahideen and then the Taliban, and sent them into Afghanistan, of course with Pakistan’s cooperation and assistance, but that when the job was done Pakistan was left high and dry — ‘no one was with us, we were alone’ from 1989 to 9/11, and that there was ‘obviously an impact’, an impact which he is still combating.
As for Nicholas Kristof, he should now be invited to Pakistan — to make up for the visa refused to him by the embassy in Washington when he planned to come back to Pakistan to follow up on the Mukhtaran Mai story — a refusal which he wondered was due to the attempted Mukhtaran cover-up or to the nuclear cover-up — another subject on which he has written several columns. We need to make amends after antagonizing one of the leading columnists of a leading publication.
One other major problem is the way news and views are projected from within Pakistan to the media without. It often seems that facts are misrepresented, highly exaggerated, or even invented — or that they are grossly misunderstood and misinterpreted. One instance of this came in a column in The Independent of June 15 written by Jan Mcgirk, on the Mukhtaran story and Musharraf : “Instead of promoting justice in the case, his reaction, along with a group of newspaper editors, has been to suppress information about the case.”
The president even threatened to “slap” a reporter “in the face” for publishing details in an international magazine...”. And even Kristof seems to have it wrong when he wrote in his June 21 column, quoting (or misquoting) Asma Jehangir on the fiasco of the human rights demonstrations in Lahore last month which were disallowed and then allowed : “Ms Jehangir says the directions to the police about her, coming from an intelligence official close to General Musharraf, were ‘Teach the [expletive] a lesson. Strip her in public.”
Can we believe the words of a spook?
Now, knowing the general as I do, unless he has completely lost his head, these two remarks allegedly coming from him just cannot be taken at their face value. That his minions, using his name, are the culprits is quite believable. His choice of subordinates has never been his strong point. General, you must one day soon realize that when it comes to statesmanship and politics, to be effective favouritism has to be cast aside.