The year after
The nuclear explosions by India at Pokhran in the Rajasthan desert in May 1998 plunged Pakistan into a “damned if you will, damned if you don’t” crisis. As a knee-jerk reaction, a tit-for-tat blast was a non-starter but the venom flowing out of the BJP leadership governing India was startling, if not altogether shocking, the Indians clearly annunciating their intention to rub our noses in the dirt. And they did not let up even when the entire world rebuked them, they pushed us into a corner and unless we reacted we would not have been left with any options as a deterrent or have a credible defence left. In a perverse way one must be thankful to the Indians, they let us come out of the nuclear closet without facing the retribution we would have if we did not have a cast iron “casus belli”.
We started the year badly, within hours of the Chagai blast, we had frozen all foreign currency accounts, destroying our financial credibility for many years. While our expatriate workers abroad will continue to send funds, as a safe haven Pakistan is not a venue anymore. Some people had guessed (or had been told) that the Government of Pakistan (GoP) would go down that route and had already started to empty their accounts pre-May 28 and send them abroad, some tried it on May 28 evening, GoP still does not publish the list of such “patriots”. Having spent all the foreign exchange in private accounts on government expenditures, one supposes GoP had no choice if they had not put a stop to the “pyramid scheme”, relying on a balance of inflows to finance outflows. For some time we were in real trouble financially as along with home remittances, IMF and other funds dried up. And if that was not enough, we stoked up the Kalabagh Dam issue out of the blue. However it was clear that the US blamed the Indians for starting the nuclear race in the South Asian sub-continent and that the Americans did not have their hearts in the imposition of sanctions against us. By the end of the year Mian Nawaz Sharif was in the Oval Room in the White House and we had got from the US the balance of the money we had paid for the F-16s not delivered to us and were back on the IMF track. In the meantime the Pakistan Rupee took a severe beating against the US Dollar, down to Rs.62 at one time before coming back to Rs.52 in the open market, where it stays at the present time. However a “correction” is overdue. The economy, which pre-May 28, was well on the rebound after a severe dose of Zardari-itis put Pakistan under severe economic pressure. With the cotton crop doing badly, the strains multiplied and it was only the infusion of the IMF tranches and release of other loans and credit from world financial institutions that shored up our foreign exchange resources, at one time down to US$ 350 million, less than one weeks import value.
The nationalised commercial banks (NCBs) have had very little success against loan defaulters in the absence of meaningful executive action. To an extent the threat did work but the chronic defaulters have spirited their money away to safer havens. Without executive commitment, the laws of the land are flexible enough to be challenged in court. The bigger the defaulter the better legal advice he (or she) can muster, the net result is that the NCBs are still floundering debt-wise. On the other hand both Habib Bank Ltd and United Bank Ltd have restructured well and the tide has turned from the serious situation Zardari’s cronies had brought them to.
The Armed Forces had a hiccup in their leadership when the Acting Chairman and COAS Gen Jehangir Karamat chose to retire early and GoP appointed as COAS Gen Pervaiz Musharraf without naming a Chairman for the JCSC. This was obviously to keep Lt Gens Ali Kuli Khattak and Khalid Nawaz out of the pecking line while providing a stop-gap for the PM’s real choice Lt Gen Ziauddin, an Engineer Officer, who was moved to the ISI as DG, Musharraf surprised everybody by ensuring a very smooth transition and moving quickly to assert his authority within the Army and several months later despite their newly found manhood the Nawaz Sharif regime had no choice but to bow down to the logic of GHQ’s pressure and make Gen Musharraf Acting Chairman JCSC, albeit only for one year. In the meantime the Army has well and truly got involved in governance except that what is in vogue is called a “creeping mode”. Over 30,000 rank and file have taken over WAPDA lock, stock and barrel since end January 1999 in trying to enhance WAPDA’s revenues. While the results have not been staggering for the amount of effort put in, it has been a satisfactory exercise in the sense that the self-destruct bomb in WAPDA stopped ticking. However what is going to happen once the Army’s mandate expires in July is open to debate. Will WAPDA’s employees go back to their bad old days with a vengeance? And now it is believed a smaller “white knight” plan is being readied by the Army for the Railways and other “sick” corporations, etc. This will be a Hobson’s Choice for the Chief, how to maintain the operational effectiveness of the Army without compromising their efficiency and integrity. However one thing is clear, the Army has to get involved to keep the socio-economic facilities functioning. The only thing one can advice the COAS is to limit the involvement and select able persons to lead such efforts, not those who, because of their background, suffer from severe doses of inferiority complex and thus have a personal agenda for revenge. People with personal demons to slay will give the Army a bad name.
The government’s handling of the print media has been very ham-handed whereas one expected that it would have been more sophisticated. There was no need to resort to bully tactics, it made unnecessary martyrs and muddied up the issues whereas the GoP could have come out noses simply by doing nothing. Freedom of Press has been achieved after a great struggle, in the absence of a credible code of ethics and in the use of “midnight knock” tactics, the entire Press corps ganged up despite some contra feelings on the subject. There has to be a continual dialogue with the members of the fourth estate to resolve the differences so that the Nawaz Sharif regime does not get boxed up into a corner.
Despite Ms Benazir’s conviction, Sindh has been quiet. The main reason has been that Governor’s rule has been fair and just. Even though the main reason was to stamp out the law and order problem caused by MQM militancy, the citizens of the Province, especially Karachi, are not under the same continual stress that they suffered under so-called democratic rule by the PML-MQM coalition in Sindh. On being indicted by the Ehtesab Bureau, Benazir had tried to rouse the PPP cohorts throughout the country, except for some towns in interior Sindh; street protests remained remarkably unsuccessful throughout Pakistan. A marriage of convenience is being contemplated between the PPP and MQM, this should be interesting given the raison d’etre for MQM’s existence in the first place, the supposed suppression of the rights of the Mohajirs in Sindh by the ethnic Sindhis who form the major percentage of the PPP’s leaders, rank and file.
While one admires self-confidence in one’s leadership, after the nuclear blasts the PM is widely held to have become over-confident, in an “imperial” mood that is at once defiant and cannot absorb or accept defiance. As events unfold, it seems clear that Mian Nawaz Sharif had no choice but to explode the bomb, if he had not the masses would have brought him down. It is also clear that the only reason for the delay of almost 20 days in the explosion was because of logistics and not because the PM was seriously considering the US President and other world leader’s repeated exhortations not to react to India’s nuclear adventure. However the delay did serve to give him the aura of contemplating an “agonizing decision”. Since then the PM has been lucky, mainly because of the revised US perceptions of geo-politics in the region. One hopes that the over-confidence that has resulted does not go to his head and he takes decisions of importance in the future based on logic and fact, not on the back of raw emotions or instinct. In the movie, “The Day After” a nuclear holocaust, the people on a devastated Earth are left with very little of the comforts they enjoyed the previous day. One year after our nuclear explosion, we have been very lucky to survive not only world approbation but physical sanctions that almost crippled us economically. We must remember that we cannot take the events of the past six months as good fortune to continue to play “Russian roulette” with the nation’s destiny, as if the tomorrows of our children do not matter to us today.
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