January 6, 2006
Another winter of discontent
Ayaz Amir
RESTORING the writ of the government is one of the oldest and deadliest cliches in the Pakistani dictionary. We have been establishing and restoring this writ since independence. The results are there for all to see.
We were exactly in this business of restoring state authority in East Pakistan in 1970-71. The less said about that the better. We have been so successful in restoring it in South Waziristan that no tribal malik dare flaunt his pro-government credentials anymore, powerful maliks supporting military operations having been eliminated and barbers afraid to trim beards for fear of offending Taliban-style local militants. So much for the writ of the state.
Now, guns blazing and helicopter gunships pressed into service, we are restoring state authority in Balochistan. With no reporters on the spot filing stories, details are scanty. But this much is clear: a full-fledged military operation is underway in the Marri and Bugti areas with tribesmen offering stiff resistance to government forces.
In Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi where the marriage season is in full swing and where ostentation touching obscene proportions is very much the prevailing norm, few people may be sparing much thought for what's going on. But for anyone with even half a mind open, the situation is grim and getting desperate.
Earthquake relief is a daunting enough task by itself. It becomes more complicated when, driven by God knows what higher wisdom, President Musharraf out of the blue raises an issue almost tailor-made to tear the nation apart: the Kalabagh dam. Punjab, Wapda (the water and power authority) and the Pir of Pagara are for it. Everyone else is against. But Wapda persists with its dubious figures and justificatory theories, proving in the process that it is a more powerful disrupter of national unity than any external force.
As if all this wasn't enough, official ingenuity has succeeded in cooking up a full-scale insurgency in Balochistan. The rights and wrongs of Baloch demands apart, a government, any government, can't escape its share of responsibility when guns begin to do all the talking.
Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti is no anti-Pakistan secessionist. All his life he has been in the mainstream of national politics. Maybe his attitude at times is a bit rigid. But then one must understand the culture and society from where he comes. Things are handled differently in Punjab. Our politicos feel no qualms in bowing before authority, however arbitrary and unjust. The Baloch for all their faults, and they have their share of them, are made differently. The language that Punjabis accept they don't. If we don't understand this, we don't have much of a clue about the nature of the Pakistani federation.
In any event, that's what politics and dialogue are all about: breaking down the walls of rigidity. If all of us were reasonable, there would be no need of diplomacy and conciliation. If Islamabad and Dhaka had been on the same wave-length, there would have been no breaking point in 1970. So, please, let's remove our blinkers and stop ducking behind the old clashes.
Allowing a situation to develop where the Bugtis and Marris take to the gun testifies to the failure of political imagination. Who is to blame? India, RAW, the CIA, or our own failure to develop and sustain political institutions? The military mind may be a wonderful thing in itself but where politics is concerned, it is an unmitigated disaster. This has nothing to do with Gen Musharraf personally. He may be the best guy in the world, warm, convivial and tolerant of criticism. These are qualities we look for in a friend. From a ruler we expect something more: vision, perspicacity, competence and, if we are lucky, a sense of history.
If our history tells us anything it is that whenever we have had one-man rule - Ghulam Muhammad, Mirza, Ayub, Yahya or Zia - folly and disaster have been our lot. It is proving no different this time. Under a reasonably wise and competent dispensation we should have been able to turn the corner in six years. We should have been able to discover a national sense of purpose (which in turn would have bolstered national self-respect). Some successes have undoubtedly been scored in the economic field, although the benefits of this have been felt more by the upper and middle classes than the vast majority of Pakistanis. But as far as national cohesion is concerned, we seem to be worse off than we were six years ago.
Far from cementing national unity, military rule has proven a polarizing force. It has weakened, if not destroyed, political institutions, including political parties, which, with the exception of the MQM, which seems to fully understand where it is and where it is going, seem to have lost all sense of direction. Whether it is the PPP, now reduced to being a cake-cutting outfit (any anniversary, Bhutto's, Benazir's, and you can count on the party wheeling in a huge cake and so-called leaders grinning for the cameras), the PML-N which seems to have no written, no revolutionary manifestoes in Jeddah, and the firebrand mullahs of the MMA who seem to have made a virtue of compromise and expediency, there is little to choose between them.
Talk of the people of Pakistan being confused or, more accurately, becoming victims of apathy. With leaders like these, where do they go?
Given this situation, and especially given the situation in Balochistan where, oblivious of history, the army is at its favourite game of pounding mountains and "miscreants" again, we shouldn't be surprised if India tries to fish in muddy waters. We may denounce India as much as we may like but when we ourselves create such an opportunity, let's not count on India not to exploit it.
We exploited the Khalistan issue for all it was worth in General Zia's time. We tried to keep the fires of insurgency burning in occupied Kashmir as long as we could and if we are now desisting it is less because of any change of heart than of a change in the international climate. The foreign office of course has done the right thing by saying it is no business of India's to say anything about Balochistan. But a more befitting answer to India is to put our house in order and solve political problems through dialogue and engagement, not helicopter gunships (fast becoming the defining metaphor of this conflict).
One of the qualities most highly prized in Kakul (and I say this from experience) is initiative, both at the level of the individual and the collective: the ability to make the first move, to frame your own agenda for the battlefield. When an army retains the initiative, it commands; when it loses it, you can bet the tide has turned.
After six years and some months in power, the initiative has slipped away from Musharraf. Once upon a time it was in his power to shape the national agenda. Not any more. Now he is reduced to making such statements as that if he had not been in uniform the army might have been slow to respond to the earthquake.
The army needs no certificate in patriotism. It is a national institution which doesn't need a president in uniform to tell it what its duty is, or should be, in an emergency. Does Gen Musharraf really mean to say that but for him the army would have been slow to move to the quake-hit areas, that it wouldn't have responded quickly to any summons from a civilian head of government? This is about as insulting as it can get both for the nation and for the army.
This is time to think hard about where the nation is drifting. Political parties must emerge from their torpor and come out forcefully against the operation in Balochistan. Otherwise, like the winter of 1971, we will be left remembering another winter of discontent.
© DAWN Group of Newspapers, 2006