WHY did the Father of the Nation, and those who thought like him, talk of things like democracy and the rule of law? They could have saved themselves a great deal of trouble had they known what we would do with these concepts.

They had vision (which all great men in some measure possess) but hardly the gift of foretelling the future. Could Mohammad Ali Jinnah in his worst nightmares have dreamt of the amazing constitutional experts being thrown up by the Q League, wizards like the parliamentary affairs minister Dr Sher Afgan Niazi, law minister Wasi Zafar and now even the Q League’s resident intellectual, Mushahid Hussain, who are preparing the nation for Gen Musharraf’s re-election as president by the present assemblies?

If Jinnah could have foreseen all this, if he could have visualized the three or four horsemen of the apocalypse who between them, have made of Pakistan the mess that it is, if through some crystal ball he could have taken in the jokers packing the national stage, could he not — heresy though it be to say this — have had second thoughts about many things?

‘Re-election’? Not having been ‘elected’ in the first place, the question of ‘re-election’ in the case of our fourth horseman of the apocalypse doesn’t really arise. But this is quibbling over small matters. The president wants to be ‘re-elected’ for another five-year term, not knowing when to quit simply not being in our genes, our psyche or indeed the collective sum of Islamic history. So let us go along with his explanation of the constitutional landscape.

Let us stick to the fiction that he is up for ‘re-election’ and the leading lights of the Q League are burning midnight oil poring over the Constitution to see how he can be ‘elected’ ‘constitutionally’, strictly in accordance with the Constitution. Indeed, the line being taken by the Q League’s constitutional experts — Sher Afgan and company — is that if the soldier-president is not ‘elected’ by the present assemblies, the latest by Sep/Oct next year, it would be a grave violation of the Constitution.

Who could have imagined that a military regime and its henchmen would become such sticklers for constitutional propriety? But then stranger things have happened. Consider also that if the devil can cite scripture for his purpose — and he does so all the time, there being no more assiduous reader of the holy texts than him — there’s not much wrong with Sher Afgan and Wasi Zafar, and now friend Mushahid Hussain, throwing the Constitution at the nation in order to pave the way for the general’s ‘re-election’ in the safest possible manner.

For six and a half years (it is getting to be a bit more than that now) we have been told that there’s no braver man around than the soldier-president, and no one more popular and beloved than him. Which makes it all the more incomprehensible that a man of such sterling courage and great popularity should be so petrified at the thought of a reasonably honest election process.

So what is the prospect ahead? This being a game of power and not of anything connected to the letter or spirit of the law, chances are that the general and the constitutional clowns attending on him will have their way. Let us not forget that we are a tame nation, having proven more than once that we can put up with a lot. Still, with what they are now about to inflict on the nation these clowns may do nothing else but they will drag both the nation and the Constitution through another needless storm and crisis.

Not that Pakistan won’t survive the storm. If it could survive Field Marshal (self-appointed) Ayub, Gen Yahya and Gen Zia — not to mention the folly of the ‘65 war and the break-up of the country in 1971 — it will survive Musharraf’s ‘re-election’ as president by the present assemblies. But that so much of national energy should be consumed by such over-the-top political trickery says something about our skewed sense of priorities and the national talent for creating avoidable problems.

What these masters of slapstick are saying has already crossed all limits of audacity: that this or that Article of the Constitution allows Musharraf to remain president-in-uniform, that this and this reading of the Constitution allows him to be elected by the present assemblies. Is it a Constitution we have or a piece of rubber capable of being stretched in any direction?

This is courage with military trimmings, courage dressed in uniform. That’s what we are told. Although the question arises that if this is courage, one can only wonder at the colour and shape of timidity.

All the same, the soldier-president should be counting his blessings. There’s no flock of sheep on the planet more tame and loyal than the political specimens collected in the ruling alliance: the Q League and assorted allies — MQM, Sindh front, such comic figures as Leghari and Jamali, and the secret weapon in the military’s arsenal, Maulana Fazlur Rehman. Anyone with his senses about him would get ‘elected’ from this soap opera rather than run the risk of anything resembling a reasonably honest election.

Apropos the Maulana, he’s about the cleverest performer we have on the national stage: smooth, articulate, cool. But not very convincing because he seems all things to all men, running with his own bearded crowd and giving every appearance of hunting with the generals. He is much too smooth for his own good. The soldier-president is at least predictable. He wants to get ‘re-elected’, indeed emulate the example of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak who has been around forever. The Maulana is not predictable. In a crunch no one can say for sure what he will do.

We are a nation not only plagued by lawyers (there being too many of them around) but also afflicted with lawyerly arguments. We go for a dubious reading of the Constitution when we should have our eyes focused on what the old communists of the Soviet school used to call ‘the balance of forces’. The soldier-president will get himself ‘re-elected’ president not because of the Constitution but because of GHQ and its divisions. Why doesn’t he take off his uniform? Because his uniform, and not the comic opera of the Q League, is the only insurance policy he has going for him.

The Constitution is subservient to this ‘balance of forces’. Only people’s power — the kind we saw recently in Nepal — can create a new dynamic by liberating the Constitution from the stranglehold of GHQ. What are Sher Afgan, Wasi Zafar and others of their kind? Their master’s loyal voices, nothing more. They will do what is expected of them. They will sit on a block of ice if that is what the presidential dispensation commands.

If the wind changes direction they will stun everyone by singing a different tune. But the wind must shift before they do that. The weather must change before the Constitution can come into its own.

So the question really is not what the soldier-president wants — we all know what he wants and if we forget there is always Dr Sher Afgan to remind us — but what the assorted opposition to the soldier-president is capable of doing. Can they adopt a unified and clear stand on the all-important question of the soldier-president’s ‘re-election’? And after this can they mobilise people’s power?

Can Pakistan become Nepal? That is the crucial question.