When Will Mr. Aitzaz Ahsan Tell the Truth?
By Ahmed Quraishi
Islamabad, Pakistan
In politics, you couldn’t be luckier than Mr. Aitzaz Ahsan. His luck is every politician’s dream. Thanks to his role in the chief justice case, he is almost getting away without facing tough questions about his past politics.
Some people, especially those who oppose the Musharraf administration, are willing to let him get away without telling us the truth about the kind of politics Mr. Ahsan has been practicing in his public career.
Why should Mr. Ahsan face any of those questions?
The answer is simple.
In Pakistan, we have a feudal, elitist political class that has played the biggest part in retarding the development of Pakistani democracy and Pakistani public institutions. It’s easy to blame the military. But everyone forgets that after Independence, we changed prime ministers almost every year for eleven years before the military finally stepped in.
This feudal and cruel elite controls all the major political parties, with the exception of Jamaat-e-Islami and MQM maybe. This elite will not allow people like me, an ordinary, middle class educated Pakistani, to rise to any party top slot.
What to speak of me, even smart, non-feudal Pakistani politicians, like PPP’s Sherry Rehman or PML’s Tariq Azim, stand no chance of ever reaching the top.
Mr. Aitzaz Ahsan is one of those elitist feudal lords of this country.
Recently, he wrote an op-ed for The News. More of a tear jerker than an editorial. In it, he tried to take us back to the ‘romantic’ days of November 1988 when, according to him, the Pakistani government was forced at the last minute to hand over power to the late Mrs. Bhutto after the elections. Of course, Washington was also lobbying at the time to see her in power, lobbying very hard. But that is a story for another day.
As a young Pakistani, I believe this great nation, Pakistan, has a lot more to offer than this domineering, feudal, incompetent elite. That's why it is imperative to pose questions to our feudal-politicians like Mr. Ahsan. [Syeda Abida Hussain, another feudal elitist who, coincidentally, belongs to the same party as Mr. Ahsan, made fun of President Musharraf’s mother in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, because Mr. Musharraf comes from the middle class and his mother used to work as a typist when she was young.]
If he is such a great democrat, Mr. Ahsan strangely refuses to address the question of why not tell us why did he agree to be part of the charade at the central executive committee of the PPP that elected Mrs. Benazir Bhutto party chairman for life, knowing that she had maneuvered to kick out her mother from the position and lobbied hard to keep her brother away?
If Mr. Ahsan could muster the guts to boycott this year’s elections in violation of party policy, why couldn’t he make a similar sacrifice for democracy within the party and refuse to work under a party lifetime dictator?
Again, if Mr. Ahsan’s struggle is for democracy, why did he keep silent on the preposterous royal succession within his party after Mrs. Bhutto’s death?
If his fight is for principles, why couldn’t he say it to Mrs. Bhutto’s face when he was boycotting the elections and her party leader insisted on taking part in the elections? Why didn’t he simply abandon the party and firmly put all his eggs in the lawyers’ basket?
Why did he have one foot in the lawyers’ movement and the other in the PPP? Why was he betting on both? So that he could return to the party if the ‘movement’ fails?
Instead of addressing these very legitimate questions, which I am sure are on the minds of others like me, Mr. Ahsan shamelessly defended late Mrs. Bhutto’s opportunism in his op-ed, apologetically justifying his and her politics this way:
“[People] did not understand that … Bibi was forced to factor painful ground realities in her decision making.”
Ground realities? Isn’t that another word for, umm, opportunism?
I have no problem with being realistic in politics. It’s just that you can’t be a realist and then still claim to be a man of principles, fighting for a democracy that you never allowed in your own party on two occasions: one, when you voted a lifetime party president, and, two, when you silently accepted a royal succession from mother to son in a party that is supposed to be fighting for democracy.
Of course, I am not going to say anything about how truly educated, middle class Pakistanis have no room in the PPP, which is a front for feudal lords — like almost every other Pakistani political party
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