Mixed Trend
According to a pre-polls survey conducted by Research & Collection Services (RCS) on behalf of THE NATION, despite winning 18-20% of the nationwide vote, the alliance of religious parties Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), was not translating this vote bank into seats. This wrong surmise was the only real casualty of the survey with respect to NWFP, MMA confounded skeptics in the Province by sweeping the polls, and doing far better in Balochistan than expected. The alliance was far more potent electorally in these two Provinces than in Punjab and Sindh. Not to say that they did not cause a couple of upsets in Sindh, particularly in Karachi where, despite controlling the Local Bodies in an election boycotted by the MQM, they were not expected to create any dents in the MQM vote bank. Other than their traditional strongholds in the mountains the MMA swept aside the liberal ANP and the PPP-P in their Peshawar valley fiefdom. The local alliance between ANP and PPP-P proved fatal for the two political parties. Only Aftab Sherpao’s faction of PPP survived this onslaught, and that only because of seat adjustment with MMA.
The MMA emergence is a great blessing in disguise for Pakistan. For the first time since 1947, the Shia-Sunni divide has been bridged, they voted for the same cause. And Iran’s model gives us hope, to stay the pace of the modern world, the Mullahs had to come into line, including the treating of women as equal to men. Things went more or less as predicted in the rest of the country, except that in Lahore, PML (Q) was routed because of the clean seat adjustments between PPP-P, PML (N) and MMA. Electorally the results in Balochistan remained as mixed as usual. The MQM lost ground very slightly in Karachi and Hyderabad but was compensated by the almost 30% increase in urban seats. By the time this goes into print, the final results will be in but these are hardly likely to be so dramatic as to change the political kaleidoscope predicted by the THE NATION’s pre-polls.
Benazir Blinks!
The Bhutto family functions on the premise that most Pakistanis have very short memories, unfortunately they are quite right. Ms Benazir was the first major politician to welcome the military regime’s dispatching of Mian Nawaz Sharif on Oct 12, 1999, the “honeymoon” went on for sometime. The PPP Chairperson finally realized that the one-sided “love affair” was going nowhere, the military regime being in no mood to drop corruption charges against her or her husband, Asif Zardari. Frustrated in the hope that on the basis of “an enemy of an enemy is a friend”, the military regime’s animosity towards Mian Nawaz Sharif would force political compromise with her. Ms Benazir did a smart U-turn, transforming her politics into virulent opposition. A consummate political animal, she gave the appearance of keeping back channels open to the COAS, mainly to shore up the morale of her increasingly demoralized supporters who were expecting some relief in Nawaz’s ouster. When the military regime denied any such contact, she declared “war” on the Pakistan Army.
For the past eight months Ms Benazir has been assailing the defenders of this country, synchronizing her attacks on our men in uniform in line with India’s contention, i.e. Pakistan Army is to blame for cross-border terrorism across the LOC, the attack on Indian Parliament, harbouring and sponsoring terrorism of all kind, etc. To retain the loyalty of her party workers while in self-imposed exile, she has kept a barrage of misleading propaganda going, the latest being that she would return to Pakistan by special aircraft on August 14 and fight the elections despite the election laws. This brinkmanship may be brilliant politically, the fact remains that other than being forced to knuckle down to the existing reality of the military regime’s ground rules for politics in Pakistan, she has succumbed to internal pressure within PPP forcing her to nominate Makhdoom Amin Fahim as the head of a newly created Parliamentary entity of the PPP. Her choice as rubber-stamp was Aftab Shahban Mirani. Winking at the military regime for sometime, she then tried international pressure to stare them out, Ms Benazir has now blinked.
Thinking the Unthinkable
Almost 250 years to the day a lady named Mughlani Begum was installed as the Governor of the Province of Lahore, succeeding her deceased husband, the Viceroy of Lahore, Moinul Mulk, popularly known as “Meer Mannoo”. A compromise between several opposing factions who did not want anyone strong and powerful from any of the other sides in that seat of power, she ruled Lahore between 1754 and 1756 with such authority that the factions who had agreed to a woman in the first place out of a misplaced conception that she was the weaker of the sexes, united out of convenience to depose her (and the favourite Eunuch she had subsequently married), installing in her place another puppet. Mughlani Begum emulated many Lahorites (before and after her) who sought refuge in Kashmir whenever Ahmed Shah Abdali ventured from Afghanistan. With the Kashmir valley inaccessible to Pakistanis, the place of political exile presently is Model Town, today’s Mughlani Begum being succeeded as Chief Minister (CM) by another nobody (at least on a sliding scale basis) named Sardar Arif Nakai, giving company in the political cold to his former mentor, Mian Nawaz Sharif. Like the retired US general given the assignment by US President Lyndon Baines Johnson to assess the war situation in Vietnam, who advised “just declare victory and go home”, Ms Benazir Bhutto and the State-controlled media has declared victory in dislodging Wattoo from his CM’s perch and gone off to Islamabad, conveniently forgetting that the whole exercise was meant to install a PPP person as CM according to the burning desire of the PPP rank and file in the Punjab who struggled mightily to be rid of Wattoo but are still left out in the cold. The exercise of constitutional farce continues, whereby a minuscule minority, in the form of Chattha and party, have emerged much stronger while Ms Benazir, a brave front notwithstanding, has been severely wounded politically, using up many of her rumoured nine lives — and her near and dear ones that much poorer for having doled out millions to the greedy and undeserving in a no-win game of horse trading.
Pakistan today is in a deep crisis because of the farce that is practiced in this country in the name of democracy, having no relation to constitutional logic or morality. The wonder is that educated men prefer to ignore this reality. In Sindh there is an urban-rural divide that is gradually fostering an economic crisis. While one or two-day strikes hurts petty businesses, the frequency of strikes has started to paralyse commercial activity on a wider scale, particularly those dependent on daily cash flow, such as various services, vending, etc. Children stayed away from schools, shops remained closed, office attendance was thin, Karachi Stock Exchange was closed, port activity was minimal, but most important since the cash counters of the banks and the Central Clearing House of State Bank of Pakistan did not function, money movement which is the oil of the economic engine was shutoff. The result is that the engine that revs up the economy in the form of livelihood of the middle class and the poor, is grinding to a halt, no matter that certain areas of Karachi had transport plying on a reduced basis. The gradual wearing down of Karachi’s commercial life is having a domino-like effect on the rest of the country, we are not many miles from economic midnight. Sharing of the ever-decreasing economic pie by competing ethnic groups, makes Karachi’s problem very political. While Gen Babar has had success in his single-minded campaign against the terrorists, the Administration is losing the battle for the hearts and minds of the people, only possible through a dual track socio-economic package meant to alleviate the miseries of the common Karachi citizen. Without such an initiative, the schism is going to get deeper, instead of trying to re-induct the alienated Mohajir Community back into the mainstream of Pakistani life, we are making them more estranged from our national ethnic melting pot. Everybody agrees something has to be done to stop this polarisation, why doesn’t somebody do it then before the country goes to pieces? While the awaited revolt in the NWFP against Aftab Sherpao has not taken place, it is lurking dangerously near the surface. In Balochistan, the government of Zulfikar Ali Magsi is only surviving by pragmatic exercise of the art of compromise but this delicate balancing act can be undone by the re-settling of the rebel Bugti clan of Kalpars in Sui, what it will do to the supply of gas if a conflagration between the warring clans breaks out is left to one’s imagination! As it is the Taliban movement in Afghanistan may well spill over into the areas bordering Pakistan in both NWFP and Balochistan, with disastrous consequences for our more liberal society.