The Change in Pakistan: Wearing Tight Shoes without Socks – II
By Mohammad Ashraf Chaudhry
Pittsburg, CA
“The Nation that will insist upon drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking by cowards”. - Sir William F. Butler.
Mr. Singh vacillated, perhaps, due to two reasons: the state machine, says the Economist of June 9, remained outdated. It lacked the ability to overcome red tape tactics and the vested interests, nor did it appear willing to loosen its grip on the economy it controls. India is lucky to have a corruption-busting supreme court, the leading IT firms.
The second big cause again has much to do with politics. The bureaucracy is degenerated, and its politics is fragmented. The two big parties, the ruling Congress and the opposition BJP, are losing support to regional and local politics and parties. No tangible reforms have taken place, and whatever little had been accomplished, was done secretly. All reforms - tax, end of subsidies etc. - remained abandoned due to the fear of protests. One perception is that Mr. Singh has little clout of his own, he reports to the ailing Sonia Gandhi. Congress does not want to take any risks before the general elections of 2014. Feeble politics is inherently linked with feebler economic growth. There is no other way around. The above scenario looks all too familiar and is reflective of what is happening in Pakistan. Simply change the names, the substance remains perfectly valid.
Another good thing in India is that the voters are alive to the fact that life is much more than religion, cricket and the next square meal. They are beginning to realize that slower economics means few jobs and more poverty. They protest but do not burn each others’ assets. They are all prepared to vote for a change. And they are not very particular about personalities as they are getting focused on the performance. So Rahul may not be their next leader. Further, India has people like Anna Hazare (an RTI campaigner), Shanti Bhushan (a lawyer), Kiran Bedi (a former IPS officer), Prashant Bhushan (lawyer) and Arvind Kejriwal (a former IRS officer) and Santosh Hegde (a former Supreme Court Judge), who are bent upon exposing and ending corruption and graft culture, whatever it takes.
The new and emerging leadership has already begun making its mark in India. The new names that are emerging include Narender Modi , a good administrative, but is divisive and has lots of Muslim blood on his sleeves. Another strong, emerging leader is Nitish Kumar. Mr. Nick Paulson-Ellis of Financial Times calls him “Model of administrative competence”. Nitish is the chief minister of Bihar, and the leader of the Janata Dal United party. His appeal lies in the stability and economic turn-around he has brought to what has been India’s poorest state. Another clear distinction of Nitish Kumar is that he has taken measures to unify a caste-ridden state of Bihar by taking a decisively secular stance and has even managed to win over the Muslim voters, a thing Mr. Modi, and even Rahul, have failed to do. Mr. L. K. Advani at 84 is too old and in the popularity graph is in a single figure.
Indians recognize those who emerge by dint of their performance as we have noted above. In Pakistan it once happened the same way, and the memory is still fresh. Mr. Khushid Sheikh, a young lawyer from Lahore, made his impact during Ayub Khan’s time; Mian Arif Iftikhar, a rival of an emerging young Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, came to the forefront and so did Bhutto. In recent times, Umar Asghar, the son of Air Marshal Asghar Khan was another rising star during Musharraf’s time. But now, it is all different. In the last five years, notwithstanding the debacles of the government and the ill-performance of the opposition, not a single name has emerged. What the nation keeps hearing in a sickening mono-tone is a list of three names: Mr. Zardari, Mian Nawaz Sharif and Mr. Altaf Hussain. The only glimmer of light of hope is in the fourth name: that of Mr. Imran Khan. Parties encourage and promote politics of total loyalty over ability and merit.
All the problems enumerated above with regard to India are present in Pakistan. But then Pakistan has its own peculiar brand of problems too. As summed up by Mr. Ayaz Mir in his column, “With Democracy Failing, What is Succeeding?”, “In our journey towards nationhood we eschewed the rational and chose instead to play with the semantics of religion. What Pakistan has become today, a fortress not so much of Islam as of bigotry and intolerance, is a fruit of these sustained endeavors.” Mr. Ahmed Rashid has even titled his book, “Pakistan on the Brink”.
The city of Karachi is a fast burning fuse that could detonate the entire country, writes Mr. Ahmed Rashid. Which government can claim to have a right to stay in power when the people of its metropolis, Karachi, stay compelled to witnessing on daily basis targeted killing of about 12 people, and picking dead bodies of people killed by using electric drills. Victims’ heads, genitals, and limbs severed, and stuffed in sacks, and dropped on the road. Every year since 2009 elections, on the average, 1,200 people have been killed, with 300 killed in July 2011 alone. The dance of death still continues. Which country on earth would keep a home minister in whose tenure so much blood had been spilled? Pakistan, of course.
It should not surprise anyone if the country of 180 million people, called Pakistan gets its 19 th prime minister in the person of Raja Pervez Ashraf. Among the 26 British Prime Ministers that England got, including the present, Mr. David Cameron, along with the Foreign Secretary, the Home Secretary, the Controller of the Exchequer, and more than 140 members of the Parliaments, all are the product of Oxford University. What do we get? A President who insists that we should believe that the 55 million dollars lying in his Swiss account do not exist; or the parliamentarians of Pakistan who elect another PM whose reputation is already tainted by corruption allegations, and who had miserably failed to end the country’s energy crisis. Mr. Reza Rumi of Jinnah Institution calls Mr. Ashraf’s choice a “cynical choice”. If that is not enough, then have Mr. Pervez Ilahi as the country’s deputy prime minister.
Once in 1956 Chaudhri Muhammad Ali as PM resigned, both from his patron party and from the government as prime minister when his party, The Muslim League, tried to force him to restrain the newly created Republican Party. The honest Chaudhri refused by claiming that as PM the interests of the nation and not of the party were primary to him. Even the slaves of the Mughal dynasty had had some residue of human dignity and will left in them, but not in these party loyalists. Loyalty is good if it is for some upright principles, or for a stand taken for the good of the people. As predicted, wholesale bargaining takes place in each change that takes place, with the elected members manifesting their gimmicks with protruded necks with a view to attracting the best price. Ch. Pervez Ilahi in the new setup becomes the first deputy PM of the country. What the ANP and the MQM got in the shuffle will become evident in a few days. And these three enigmatic partners, the MQM, the ANP and the PPP, are in coalition, are in power, and yet Karachi bleeds on a daily basis. The pressing issue that will determine Pakistan’s future, and especially its relationship with the US is its economy, and the understanding of the complexities of the country’s economy are beyond the understanding of these leaders.
The desire for a change is good, but we should remember that change is like the sunshine. It can be a friend or a foe, a blessing, or a curse, a dawn or a dusk, says William Arthur Ward. Change which is without a method, or which is the result of total frustration with the present, often becomes a curse, a foe or a dusk, instead of being a blessing, a friend or a dawn. And this has happened so many times in Pakistan.
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