Camelot comes to Islamabad
Procedural delays having been very wisely hastened up, Ms Benazir Bhutto has become the Prime Minister of Pakistan, coming to power with the utmost goodwill from among the masses, even from those who did not vote for her party. This is as it should be as she has ceased to be just the head of the PPP majority group in the National Assembly and becomes the executive leader of the government of the country.
Ms Bhutto must reach out to her political opponents. Magnanimity in victory usually gives dividends beyond compare. This is a nation full of sentimental fools and except for the most hard-bitten, they will respond to accommodation and compromise. Being tempered by long struggle she stands to gain everything by displaying her innate girdle of steel only when absolutely necessary. She has travelled a long political road, most of the MRD components were hardtime foes of her late father, yet she managed a political compromise with them. It is imperative that she opens a dialogue with the leaders of the opposition as soon as possible.
The elections are over, the celebrations should now come to a stop. From time to time, one expects a display of emotions but if someone continues to stop us on the roads, allowing us no further without the display of PPP flag one gets to become quite impatient and frankly a little nervous as to the ultimate directions the political process may take us. One may not entirely jettison the PPP flag but certainly one expects that the Pakistan flag should be given a price of place next to it on houses and buildings and perhaps also distributed intermittently by the well-organised party cadres. Flag-waving is a great national up-lifter and needs to be worn on one’s sleeve. The Prime Minister wore a very becoming green dress draped with a white dupatta on her swearing in ceremony, the colours of Pakistan were etched in our hearts and our soul. The mass energy unleashed by the election process has now to be harness by Ms Benazir and put to optimum economic use. She has the power of new incumbency to bring the electorate with her in all her decisions, some of which may be anathema to her own political creed but may be good for Pakistan. These actions must be designed to spur economic growth and restore investors confidence badly eroded during the time of her late father. She has to prove that she is not a prisoner of history, rather that she will make positive history in her own right.
No one can deny that in the geo-political circumstances of the last decade Pakistan’s foreign policy has been one of the prime successes of the Zia regime. To mobilise international opinion for the Afghan Mujahideen we have been subjected to severe regional pressure, by the Russians to the North-West and by India to the East. Gen Zia’s greatest accomplishment was to have contrived Russian defeat without fighting a war, Machiavellian perhaps but exceedingly effective. At the same time we managed to come out of the deep economic doldrums of the late ’70s relatively stable (in comparison to other debt-ridden Third World countries).
No doubt we have had to pay quite a heavy price in the form of millions of refugees and the advent of drugs, compounded by the guns of the Kalashnikov culture. If one looks back at it one realises that we would have been better off avoiding all this but unfortunately Pakistan had no choice, short of fighting guerilla war within our own frontiers there was no way to stop the spill-over of refugees into Pakistan. So the best use of the worst possible scenario was made, an astute handling that in years to come will balance out Zia’s regime on the positive side, very much like the electorate has equalised Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s excesses less than ten years later with a mandate for Benazir. While no one expects Ms Benazir to become euphoric about Zia’s foreign policy achievements, she must develop on the foundations as the executive leader of Pakistan. As a pragmatist she must recognise strong points and reinforce every success with the dynamism that she has certainly shown she possesses. Zia’s Afghan policy was a resounding success for Pakistan internationally, Ms Benazir as a national leader should concern herself with the song and not the singer. Any undoing of Zia’s work in this respect would have tragic consequences for the country in the future. The news of the re-appointment of Sahabzada Yaqub Khan as Foreign Minister of Pakistan spells continuity and acts as a symbol to our friends among the comity of nations who have supported us over the years.
Instead of resorting to various peripheral populist measures going down well for the moment with the masses, Ms Benazir Bhutto has to tackle the bureaucratic system on a priority basis. Only with the decentralisation of decision-making into the hands of elected representatives starting at the very basic levels, the roots of the village system, will any changes be substantive. Elected local bodies at the grassroots of democracy should have all the powers rather than appointed officials. The government’s local officials job should be to function as advisors and auditors other than as hereditary rulers. The police should be accountable to the elected representatives. Prime among the transfer of real power must be that financial power is handed over to the hands of the representatives duly chosen by the people, otherwise democracy will function as the bureaucracy wills it, anybody who controls the purse strings really calls the shots.
The appointed local officials have a definite role to play, drawn on their education and experience, but it has to be that of positive monitoring rather than total supervision, motivation rather than coercion, encouragement rather than strictures and so on. There is no use having democracy at the highest level while conveniently allowing the people who cast their vote to be forgotten.
The ceremony at the Aiwan-e-Sadr on Friday afternoon was very poignant. Cynical as we may have been over the past years, Ms Benazir stood there in green and white next to the President, the very symbol of courage personified. Courage must always be eulogised and the appropriate backdrop was provided by the august assemblage, witnesses to the swearing of her fealty to the country and the masses who voted her to that position. The country has been loyal to her, loyalty is essentially a two-way street, she has to be loyal to the masses. It is a difficult road she must traverse but she should have no fear that even the most hard-bitten amongst us will wish for her to transform Pakistan into the promise that was envisaged when it was created.
To some of us, her first national address was a mixed performance. It spelt out grand strategy but did get bogged down in trivia. It was a populist speech of a leader of the PPP, not the one that one expected of her as the nation’s leader and which she is really capable of. Keeping our expectations too high, we expected her to rise to greater heights. Part of the problems stemmed from reading from script whereas extempore speeches are her forte. We may be expecting too much from her too soon, in imagining that she is infallible and given to emotions. True, she kept these under a tight leash and that is credible performance by any standards but we were swayed by our euphoria in setting levels that may be we should not have, so we got a backlash of sorts. She should have reached all Pakistanis instead of paying tribute to only those that voted for her. Caution was also well advised in certain sensitive matters but then youth shall never listen to any such admonitions and that is the glory of it all in the context of our last elections.
Freshness was manifest within the assemblage on Benazir’s swearing-in ceremony. It was a fairy tale setting for a fairy tale ending, the emphasis being on youth, contrasted by President Ishaq, almost double Ms Benazir’s age. Surely she had a catch in her throat as she read the words of the oath, more power to her that we did not perceive it. She brings more to the Prime Ministership of Pakistan than just charisma, intelligence, struggle and perseverance. She has the education to understand economic realities and take pragmatic decisions, very much like a President of the US of America who died a quarter of a century earlier. There was a whiff in the environment of a different aura in Islamabad on Friday. John Kennedy brought Camelot to Washington when he took oath as President. The torch has now been passed in Pakistan also to a new generation and if there is heritage in democracy, then we can call it the advent of Ms Benazir’s court.
If you closed your eyes you could almost perceive aspirants knights vying for places on the Round Table.
Camelot has come to Islamabad.
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