An Unholy Alliance
of Business, Power and Politics
By Mohammad Ashraf Chaudhry
Pittsburg, CA
What formerly was
called an act of treachery and betrayal is now stylistically
termed as an alliance. Pakistan and its politics
became self-sufficient in such unholy alliances
with Muslim League as its flag-bearer, because had
such re-grouping been any holier than it had been,
democracy long ago would have been the rule of the
country. Its politicians quite early on learnt the
art to be famous through infamy. Machiavelli stands
accused for spreading such pearls of worldly wisdom
as, “You can get away with murder” that
no divine sanction, or degradation of soul, or twinge
of conscience will come to punish you.
If you succeed, you will not even have to face the
infamy of murder, because when “men acquire
who can acquire, they will be praised or not blamed.
Criminals are those who fail and lose or who are
on the losing side. To brave infamy and to transform
it into a virtue is realpolitik. Men (politicians)
will not keep faith with you… politics, Machiavelli
seems to say, as much as consists in breaking promises,
for circumstances change and new necessities arise
that make it impossible to hold to one’s word.
It is in such a backdrop of shifting loyalties that
new alliances germinate and prosper. In the wake
of LB elections, Pakistan once again appears to
be in the flood-path of alliances.
BUSINESS AND POLITICS
The party that incessantly prided itself as the
founder of Pakistan movement, and is now popularly
known as the mother of all corruptions, namely Pakistan
Muslim League, in its 1997 Manifesto felt constrained
to declare “elected representatives engaged
in any private business will be subjected to specific
restrictions that will be brought in through appropriate
“conflict of interest legislation”.
The lofty claim died in its infancy. General Hamid
Gul, who often happened to be where he should never
have been, has many a time said about his infamous
meeting in Model town, Lahore with Nawaz Sharif,
when he was about to assume the office of prime
minister in 1990. The General had brought together
the opposition alliance of Islamic Jamhoori Ittehad
(IJI) that had swept the elections. The General
says that he advised the incoming PM to place his
business in a trust for the duration of his term
of office.
While Mian Sahib did not reply, his father Mian
Mohammed Sharif lost temper, saying that all their
lives they have queued for bank loans, but now that
their day had arrived, the general wanted them to
cap their business. At least, the late Mian Mohammed
Sharif had been honest in stating when most politicians
like to practice tacitly. The results have been
too obvious to warrant any comments.
Dwijendra Triparthi in his famous book about the
business communities of India scribes a golden rule,
which the Mughal rulers followed in letter and spirit.
The rule had been to by and large abstain from interfering
in the internal affairs of well-knit business communities,
leaving them to manage their affairs, and making
sure that the merchants, big or small, stayed away
from the agents of the government.
The government’s role while adjudicating in
matters of disputes had been to remain as neutral
as possible. What the Mulghal rulers practiced in
the 16th century India later became a universal
law in most of the civilized and developed world,
requiring politicians to compartmentalize their
business interest and public life. Imagine a Pakistan
with such a rule having taken firm roots. Long ago,
it would have become an Asian Canada. But alas,
in the words of Shahid-ur-Rehman (“Who Owns
Pakistan?”) bureaucracy began playing the
role of a godfather to businessmen and politicians
from day one, and business and politics became two
faces of the same coin. If Zardari and Nawaz Sharif
and many more who ought to have been with them rotted
in jail and suffered inhuman indignities, it is
only because they erred and continued to err in
drawing a line between their business interests
and the affairs of the state.
WAPDA, Railways, and CBR, all three major departments
deal with the public, and they employ the maximum
number of people, and are thereby the most corrupt
government functionaries in the order they are mentioned
here.
The saddest aspect of this unholy combination is
the part that the elected representatives have played,
and keep playing: a dual role, which being that
when it comes to reaping a rich crop of state-sponsored
privileges and perks, they do not shy away from
claiming that they are the chosen ones, and hence
are above the law that applies to the common folk
in the street; and when it comes to obtaining bank
loans for their businesses, they see no contradiction
in their assertions that they have a right to obtain
bank loans, “like any other citizen of Pakistan”.
Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain as interior minister, Asif
Zardari as spouse of a sitting PM, and Mian Mohammed
Sharif as father of a PM, did not see any wrong
in mixing up business with politics. But, then it
is not a new phenomenon. Had defaulting on the bank
loans been a cause to go to jail, at least half
of the current ministers and members of the assembly
would have ended up with them. The Saifullahs, Ahmed
Mukhtars, the Chaudhris of Gujrat, the Gohar Ayub
of Gandhara, the Basharat Elahis, the Noons, Jatois
and Sumros, to name only a few, are businessmen
as well as politicians and they see nothing wrong
in being so. They, as leaders, set the tone; people
just follow what they see them doing.
ALLIANCES ARE LIKE
SAND-DUNES
Alliances shift and reshuffle like sand dunes when
the political weather clock hints even a minor change
in the wind. Washington-based Shaheen Sehbai in
his article “US Diplomats Think Ch. Shujaat
Becoming Musharraf’s Biggest Challenger”
unnecessarily tries to read something, which has
always been too obvious to the eye. He thinks that
it is a news that the senior US diplomats in Pakistan
and in the State Department are genuinely intrigued
about the display of almost unbelievable confrontationist
posture against General Pervez Musharraf, adopted
by the most unlikely of politicians in today’s
Pakistani spectrum… the always obedient servant
of the military establishment, Choudhry Shujaat
Hussain. There is hardly any element of surprise
in it. Faisal Sualeh Hayat and Aftab Sherpao distanced
themselves from Benazir; Humayun Akhtar, Ejaz ul
Haque, Sheikh Rashid, Mushahid and Ch. Shujaat were
once the stalwart champions of Mian Nawaz Sharif’s
policies.
There had been no dearth of lurking Brutus’
in Pakistani politics. When tried on charges of
accepting gratifications in the name of gifts Francis
Bacon was right when he said, “Those who strike
at your Lord Chancellor now, will one day strike
at the Crown too”, and they did. Machiavelli
had laid down the golden principle when he noted:
“Men will always turn out bad for you unless
they have been made good by a necessity”.
The cases of affrontness cited by Sehbai against
Ch. Shujaat are: he diametrically opposed Musharraf
when he wanted to curb the Jihadis or their political
supporters; he opposed the President in his handling
of the Madrassas and expelling of the foreign Islamic
students; he differed with the President when he
wanted the exclusion of religion column in passports,
or when he wanted to getting close to the liberal
political parties like PPP. Ch Shujaat’s softness
on the Hasba Bill of the MMA and his rejecting any
changes in the Islamic Hudood laws as proposed by
the President are also viewed as his opposition
to the President’s line of action.
According to Sehbai, the US diplomats are at a loss
to understand where Shujaat was deriving his strength
from, because the very nature of the man, and his
entire politics, have always been subservient to
the whims and desires of the Establishment. He has
always been on the correct side of the powers ruling
the country, thus cleverly avoiding any accountability
or worse, political persecution. Well, it should
suffice to say that Ch. Shujaat is doing what he
is briefed to do. He is Ghulam Ishaq Khan minus
his arrogance. Failure is the fate of those who
assert. Ch Shujaat only opines.
To find a Brutus sitting in him is akin to demanding
from him to be articulate like Orpheus The melo-dramatic
revelation that Ch. Shujaat is getting his vitamins
from some Punjabi Generals is an assumption that
wants us to believe that the General has fallen
asleep on the dual seat that he is occupying or
has become a prey to a formidable sense of complacency,
which belies his nature as well as style. If he
is impetuous and idealistic, there must be somebody
who should be cautious too. Ch. Shujaat with all
his handicaps and stigmas is one such politician.
He may be learning to speak with pebbles in his
mouth, it is still better than no speech at all.
You may not like him, but you also cannot stay away
from him. This 22nd PM of Pakistan, namely Ch. Shujaat
Hussain deserves a mention that in 45 days he did
more than his predecessor Mr. Jamali did in over
two years. He averted a bloodbath in Baluchistan;
he left his office on his own; he announced that
the coffin of Ch. Rehmat Ali be brought back to
Pakistan for formal burial; and most importantly,
he passed the law which authorized the wounded in
assault to get medical treatment first before he
could be interrogated by the police; he settled
the cases of the ad-hoc employees and substantially
increased the salaries of the doctors. And of course,
he passed the Defamation Amendment Bill which protected
him and others like him from false accusations.
A general trend in Pakistani politics is to see
the virtues of one by denigrating others. That is
why we have either angels or demons living among
us. If democracy is to flourish in Pakistan in letter
and spirit, then the world must learn to appreciate
those who begin to hold a different point of view
because a true leader is also one who is a true
friend and a true enemy.
The LB elections have brought to surface the real
intent of the contestants and the parties behind
them. Since the office of Nazim and Naib Nazim etc.
has become that meeting place where politics, power
and money ideally meet, leaders who once thought
it below their dignity to participate in them, have
now been seen contesting them like it were a matter
of life and death for them. Without proper accountability
and punishment for those who fiddle with public
money, LB system would in every respect become what
National and Provincial Assembly membership had
been, a quagmire of corruption.
Politicians with conflict of interest cannot draw
that much needed line which separates private business
from public service. The problem has become further
complicated because now we see all the three, namely
money, authority and politics, sitting in great
comfort in every politician, bureaucrat, feudal
lord and military general. May be President Musharraf
can bifurcate the three, because without doing so
corruption will eat up Pakistan as it once did eat
The Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and currently
is gnawing bit by bit all the African and developing
countries of the world.
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