An Acute Sense
of Longing!
By Mohammad Ashraf Chaudhry
Pittsburg. CA
Wishful thinking is
a healthy trend, and the people of Pakistan are
undoubtedly the most optimistic lot of human segment
on this planet. Though mauled and molested ceaselessly
by the two-in-one Sardars, Nawabs, Maliks, Khans,
Vaderas and Feudal Lords-cum- politicians, and by
the incumbents of the government in power, they
have steadfastly remained sanguine and smiling.
They have always hung on to a sense of longing,
a sort of yearning, and like the famous Chief of
the Native Americans, Dan George, they have endlessly
awaited for a mythical Thunderbird, a Messiah, who
would come one day to redeem them and to reprieve
them, by pledging and proclaiming loud and clear:
“Let me accept this new culture, and through
it rise up and go on,
Like the Thunderbird of old, I shall rise again
out of the sea.
I shall grab the instruments of the White man’s
success-
His education, his skills,
With these new tools, I shall build my race into
the proudest segment of your society…
The longing of the Native Americans remained a deferred
dream as no Thunderbird (a mythical spirit of lightning
and thunder), ever arose from the sea. And today
helplessly they appear to be resonating the words
of John Winthrop, the governor of Massachusetts
(1750) who once told the white Europeans of the
newly established colony at Massachusetts, “We
shall be a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people
are upon us; so that if we shall deal falsely with
our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause
Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall
be made a story and a by-word through the world”.
Ostensibly, the Native Americans became a by-word,
a story and the displaced Europeans settled in America,
a City on the Hill.
And also the words of Robert Frost remind us something,
“One luminary clock against the sky, proclaimed
the time was neither wrong nor right. I have been
one acquainted with the night”. The timings
for the people of Pakistan are both in favor as
well as not in favor. They have been acquainted
with the night of misery and fanaticism too long.
Now the choices are lying in utter naked form in
front of them. As would say, Lorraine Hansberry
(1930-1965), the famous black American playwright
and the author of “A Raisin in the Sun”,
“Sometimes I can see the future stretched
out in front of me - just as plain as day; the future
hanging over there at the edge of my days, just
waiting for me”. Who then is the luminary
star on the Pakistani horizon to tell them which
way to turn to: Musharraf, Maulana Fazl-ur-Rahman,
Qazi Hussain Ahmad, Ms. Benazir Bhutto, Mian Nawaz
Sharif or Sirdar Akbar Khan Bugti and the mysterious
Mustafa Khar.
THE OPPOSITION’S DILEMMA: The opposition is
red in tooth and claw with President Musharraf.
While he spurns them “as a cur out of my way”,
to borrow a line from Shakespeare’s Julius
Caesar, they like Brutus after Caesar’s blood,
are heard shouting, “Stoop, Romans, stoop;
and let us bathe our hands in Caesar’s blood
up to the elbows, and besmear our swords. Then walk
we forth, even to the marketplace, and moving our
red weapons over our heads, let all cry: PEACE,
FREEDOM AND LIBERTY”.
A cry for a civil war can never be construed as
a call for freedom from oppression. Hatred is “
like the great waters that are dammed for the present;
they increase more and more and rise higher and
higher till an outlet is given; and the longer the
stream is stopped the more rapid and might is its
course when once it is let loose”, wrote once
Jonathan Edwards, the great preacher. Bloody hands
won’t bring peace, prosperity and freedom
to the people of Pakistan, and suppression like
the dammed waters won’t make the governance
of Pakistan any easier for President Musharraf.
Reach out is the only solution now. But to whom?
Jagirdars and Sirdars are a leftover of the old
Indian Princes and Rajahs. Once this specie ruled
over 40% of India in some 562 Principalities. Rudyard
Kipling once wrote about them, “Providence
created the Maharajahs to offer mankind a spectacle”
the like of which will never be seen again. Imagine
some of them ruling over principalities, like that
of Kashmir, Mysore and Hyderabad as big as England
itself. Nehru with one stroke of pen in early fifties,
and his daughter with another in 1979 turned them
into paper-Princes, forcing them to either change
or leave. Conversion of former Raj-Mahals into five-star
hotels for instance is an indication that the former
princes have learnt the art how to survive. We,
on the contrary in Pakistan, have assiduously learnt
to not only live with them, but also to live in
their awe.
Bhutto by any definition was the most intelligent,
and the most arrogant ruler that Pakistan ever had.
Sher Baz Mazari, himself a Baloch Sirdar, writes
in his book “A Journey to Disillusionment”
the details of a meeting he had with Bhutto. The
President appeared helpless as he told him, “Who
should I talk to?” He then pointed out to
Ataullah Mangal and said that Mangal openly used
the “filthiest of language” against
him. It was not just directed at him but “
also on my office, as after all I am the President
of Pakistan”. “The Marri Sirdar is so
arrogant that when I talk to him, he turns his face
away. I find his behavior intolerable”. Mazari
further writes that Bhutto kept his worst venom
for his last target. He began venting his spleen
against his own appointed governor of Baluchistan.
In an emotional voice he lashed out at Akbar Bugti
and called him “an egomaniac” and a
“schizophrenic”. And then the military
action followed. Politicians out of power combined
with other Sirdars, Maliks, Khans and Vaderas begin
making emotional pleas to stop military action and
to negotiate with the same very Sirdars, and by
doing so they vicariously protect their own fiefdoms,
and the cycle goes on. Can President Musharraf play
Nehru to these Feudals?
In the words of Hassan Abbas, as expressed by him
in his book, “Pakistan’s Drift into
Extremism” on p. 236, “It is not for
nothing that his, Musharraf’s, government
is defined by, and stands arraigned for, a level
of incompetence that he could have worked very hard
to achieve. He is therefore best defined as a master
of half measures and as the poor man’s Ataturk.”
In this context, Professor Lawrence Ziring’s
advice to president Musharraf is very relevant and
cogent, “If he truly wants to reconstruct
Pakistan, then he has no choice but to invite the
free and open play of all politicians… it
is time to accept the failures along with the frailities
and to nurture a generation of leaders unencumbered
by blind doctrines. A new generation waits off stage
in the wings of obscurity. That generation wishes
to see the Pakistan of the twenty-first century
realize its potential for greatness, not only as
a Muslim nation but as a country that represents
the better instincts of humanity”. It is,
thus, somewhere in the wings of obscurity that a
luminary star is lying in waiting to appear one
day and with one stroke of pen send these Sirdars,
Vaderas, Maliks, Tiwanas and Khans home. Till then
the nation can stay contented with the change of
Prime Ministers only.
The Economist of January 21, 2006 counts some 10
points of friction between President Musharraf and
the Opposition, and writes that “troubles
are coming not as single spies but in battalions”
for him. The Economist, somewhat unjustly accuses
President Musharraf for them. The American rocket
attack on a remote mountain village in Bajaur on
January 13; army action in Baluchistan against rebellious
tribesmen; anonymous threats against foreign aid
organizations, forcing them to suspend operations
there; Pakistan controlled Kashmir, devastated by
an earthquake in October 8; the slow progress in
the peace process with India over the Kashmir dispute;
a political rebellion in Sindh province over the
construction of the Kalabagh Dam issue; the MQM
which controls Karachi and the urban areas of Sindh
threatening to quit the Sindh government, and throwing
an ultimatum to either stop military action in Baluchistan
or get ready to face its exit. We can add two more,
namely the red-arrest warrant for extradition of
Ms Benazir managed through the Interpol, and the
mysterious reappearance of Mustafa Khar. To the
Economist, the President seems rattled by the opposition
he has provoked, and has resorted to bluster. Anybody
can see that most of these problems basically highlight
the opposition’s desperate search to find
a cause to play Brutus to this Pakistani Caesar
whom like Caesar they accuse of tyranny and dictatorship.
And this they want to do by besmearing their elbows
with his blood with a view to crying in the marketplace,
“Peace, Freedom and Liberty”. The Economist
is right in its analysis only in point, which being:
if the Sirdars of Baluchistan had fallen short in
humbling the President in total terms, his very
own MQM with its dancing workers did the rest of
the job in absolute terms. The President and the
PM of the country talked to the self-exiled Pir
for one hour to get this embarrassment; may be a
telephonic talk of the same duration to the Sirdar
of Bugti would have delivered some better results.
The country is a witness to a strange triangle:
Altaf Hussain humbles the President, and Akbar Khan
Bugti humbles Altaf Hussain by refusing to see his
“90-member fact-finding troupe”. A layman
like me is at wits end as to who is more powerful
in this triangle?
Emily Dickinson, the great American poet, beautifully
defines human urges when she says, “Water
is taught by thirst; land by the Oceans passed;
Transport, (joy and ecstasy) by throe; Peace by
its battles told; Love by memorial mold (cemetery),
and birds by the snow. A World Bank study says,
“Pakistan is already one of the most water-stressed
countries in the world… a situation which
is going to degrade into outright water scarcity”.
Maulana Fazl-ur-Rehman, a leader of the opposition,
sees no water shortage in Pakistan. Pakistan has
only 150 cubic meters of water storage per person
as compared with over 5,000 cubic meters in America
and Australia and 2,200 in China. Our mainstream
leaders, on the contrary, find it highly timely
to lay claims and settle that it is “our Indus”,
and “our Province”, and, “not
yours”.
Any sensible leadership would have rallied around
President Musharraf, and would have strengthened
his hands in steering Pakistan out of the way of
the big landslides that are taking place in and
around it. The fallouts of Afghanistan and Iraq
are beginning to register their impact on Pakistan,
while Iran is offering itself by crying “me
too”; our border belt of two Provinces is
talking of “Rent-a-son”. In the words
of one university professor of the Middle East,
“The Al-Qaeda has no place in the ME; the
governments as well as the people are singularly
united in hunting them out, and they have succeeded
to a large extent”. To him, “the biggest
hub of the Al-Qaeda now is the South-East Asia”
and by this he meant Afghanistan and Pakistan. Even
Afghanistan appears to be more clear-headed about
the dangerous cult of human-suicidal attacks on
the civilians than Pakistan.
The other day a big demonstration in Afghanistan
against the suicidal attack which resulted in the
loss of many innocent lives hinted at a right step
in the right direction, but not so in Pakistan.
The suicidal attacks on the PM and the President
did not entail a single demonstration against this
cult. Loss of innocent lives anywhere in the world
is a human tragedy, and those who furnish a cause
for such things to happen are themselves a part
of the cult. Discretion is not a sign of cowardliness.
Sympathy with others should not override national
interests, and the earlier it is understood by the
opposition the better it would be. Economic prosperity
is knocking at our door, and we are not letting
it to step in because we are in the mourning mould
in sympathy to “our brothers” who are
disowned by their own. “The evil that men
do lives after them; the good is often interred
with their bones”, was well said by Shakespeare,
and the people of Pakistan know it by experience.
It is said that President Musharraf’s manner
of dealing with the problems of his friends is revolutionary,
but when it comes to dealing with the problems of
the country, which beg revolutionary solutions,
he often supplies conventional applications. This
assessment of his person made by Hassan Abbas tends
to stick him well. The Baluchistan problem and its
handling subscribe to this view. He is also often
accused of rolling up his sleeves and gritting his
teeth when crossed, and this also seems to carry
an element of truth in it when it is applied to
his dealing with Mian Nawaz Sharif and Ms. Benazir.
It is also opined that he is amiable and is very
easy to like, and which he certainly is. Embroiled
as he is in the whirlpool of problems, the country
demands and the nation wants that he should demonstrate
the same amount and quality of magnanimity to the
leaders of the two mainstream parties by calling
them with the same length of duration as he did
in case of Altaf Hussain, a beneficiary who backfired,
while the other two have been real losers.
Gen. K. M. Arif in his book “Working with
Zia”, recalls Ms. Benazir writing to her brother
in March, 1978, “… Khar is a big trickster,
but this time you must be the bigger trickster”.
Just after the arrest when Gen. Zia took over, he
was the first to isolate him from the rest of the
PPP leadership; he was the first to see Gen. Zia
and make him believe that he can be very useful
to him against Bhutto. He was able to trick Gen.
Farman and Gen. Chishti making them believe that
he would bring some very important documents from
the UK, and that he would return to Pakistan whenever
required on three days notice. Instead he stayed
abroad for 11 years.
Sher Baz Mazari even writes that in 1984 he mustered
the support of some junior officers, traveled to
India and obtained a supply of weapons for them
with a view to toppling the regime of Gen. Zia.
Once again he is seen appearing aggressively on
the political scene telling the nation that he alone
has the key to all problems. Hopefully the nation
is not so demented as to suffer from a complete
loss of memory. The nation longs that President
Musharraf takes a bold step to take both the leaders
in exile into confidence; that he takes a revolutionary
step with relations to the Zamindars and Sirdars
and Khans; that he disposes of those who are lax
and incompetent in a quicker manner; that he never
sides with those who are fanatical in their views
with relation to Islam; that he never compromises
on the sovereignty of the country, and finally that
he stays firm on the construction of dams in the
country.
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