STRAIGHT TALK
Torching the Quaid’s Legacy
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada
The founder of Pakistan—the venerable ‘father of the nation’—must be turning in his grave. What an ungrateful bunch of people Karma picked him up to lead to salvation.
Torching the Ziarat Residency, where the Quaid spent the last days of his life, is outrageous. It’s an insult to the memory of the Quaid and outright affront to his legacy. But it isn’t something that has come out of the blue. The torching of his legacy began a long time ago. It hasn’t come to an end, to date.
The despicable process started within years of his death. It was Ghulam Mohammad, the measly bureaucrat-turned- megalomaniac leader, who as Governor General wrapped up the great democratic bequest of the Quaid by disbanding Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly.
The Quaid was a constitutionalist incarnate. He shunned and abhorred the Gandhian tactics of using street power to stage civil disobedience. Jinnah was too much of a law-deferring legalist to opt for anything but pursuing a legal road to liberation from the colonial yoke.
His bequest to the new nation he carved out, single-handedly, in the face of great adversity and monumental opposition, was respect for democracy and fealty to the rule of law. Ghulam Mohammad violated the Quaid’s covenant by striking at the very font of constitutional rule in Pakistan.
The maniac’s dastardly example quickly became a role-model for uncouth power grabbers of Pakistan’s tragic history. It opened the flood gates of wilful assault at the rampart of Jinnah’s constitutionalism and rule of law. Soldiers of fortune and carpet-bagger political upstarts latched on to Ghjulam Mohammad’d trend-setting example with abandon. Regard for the sanctity of constitution went out of the window. Rule of law was reduced to just fancy prose in books of law and school text books, while power hungry potentates made minced meat of Jinnah’s impeccable deference to democratic ideals of a society based on justice for all.
General Ziaul Haq, a Bonaparte in the league of power-grabbers who strutted on the stage of Pakistan with unremitting arrogance and hubris, was once famously quoted ridiculing the country’s constitution as a piece of trash that he could trample under his feet at will.
Even Zulfiqar Bhutto, the self-anointed Quaid-i-Awam, who was educated at some of the finest universities of the West—but could never change his leopard-spots of a congenital Wadera and autocrat—had no compunction, or shame, donning the macabre mantle of Pakistan’s first-and-only Civilian Martial Law Administrator. He didn’t stop at that. His own authored 1973 Constitution couldn’t squelch his enormous appetite for power-grabbing; the first amendment to it was inserted literally within hours of its passage, and an emergency rule was spawned under the People’s Caesar.
General Pervez Musharraf, the most Quixotic adventurer in Pakistan’s gallery of rogues, turned the abuse of the constitution and rule of law into a spectator sport. He incarcerated the Chief Justice and other judges of an ‘inconvenient and non-cooperative’ Supreme Court, en masse, and then flaunted his brazen brigandage as his ‘stamp of power.’
Mian Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan’s born-again leader and three-times-lucky PM, is no stranger either to the cast of those who didn’t quite reconcile themselves to the supremacy of the law of the land. His unsavoury brush—in his second term—with the Chief Justice of the then apex court is still quite fresh in the collective memory of the nation he has come back from his five-star Gulag to serve again. Who doesn’t remember that he’d let loose his goons’ brigade on to the Supreme Court, with clear intent to teach its honourable judges a lesson in the exercise of absolute power.
It’s ironic that the same Nawaz Sharif—with his past stigma of an appalling lack of regard for the supremacy of the law—is now at the helm of Pakistan and charged with the demanding task of tackling the menace of terrorism. And the daring raid against the Ziarat Residency was as good, or bad, as any act of terrorism stalking Pakistan from one end to another.
One may not be niggardly in conceding that it’s a different Nawaz Sharif in his third stint in power, and that he has learned a lesson or two in humility in exile, no matter how plush it may have been.
However, a question begging for answer is: does he appreciate the enormity of the task on his hands and has he, really, what it takes to deal with a challenge of such epic proportions?
It’s clearly too early to pass a judgment on his ability or readiness to confront the monster of terrorism gnawing at the fundamentals of Jinnah’s Pakistan—whatever has survived of it since the debacle at Dhaka, circa 1971.
That it will take a lot of head-scratching and fine-tuning in his inner circle, before Nawaz Sharif (NS) comes up with a credible strategy to grapple with the problem and end the long nightmare of the people of Pakistan, as they expect him to, is understandable to all those not swayed by political rhetoric or consumed by spasms of raw emotions, which our people are quite capable of.
As of now, NS seems seriously inclined to give primacy to dialogue with the Pakistani Taliban. He’d articulated this preference even before he got into the heat of his election campaign. But his American friends—who welcomed his ascension to power with a pat on his back—have created problems by targeting Wali-ur-Rehman, the second-in-command of the Taliban, in a drone attack. The attack has led to the Taliban back-racking in their earlier commitment to pursue a dialogue with the government.
The American attitude—of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds--seems doubly ironic and callous, because Washington has just announced its own process of dialogue with the Afghan Taliban. The newly-minted Taliban office in Doha, Qatar, has been inaugurated with fanfare and all road signs are pointing to an accelerated peace process with those whom Washington tried to blast off on the battle-field but couldn’t.
The scourge of terrorism in Pakistan, however, can’t be blamed on the Taliban alone. There are other villains to the piece. Baluchistan is like a foxes’ lair in which too many obnoxious and blood-thirsty villains are running around, with each trying to carve out their own niche, their own turf. It was one clique of Baluch terrorists who torched the Residency at Ziarat, while another blasted a bus of girl students in Quetta, killing at least 14 of them.
Nawaz must come up with a broad blueprint for the whole of Pakistan pegged on a firm commitment to give no quarters to terrorists, anywhere in the country, and deal with them firmly.
But he would need a back-up plan too, to deal with specific needs of a province.
For example, in Baluchistan, as also in KP, it will have to be a blend of stick-and-carrot. The Baluchi nationalists—especially the disgruntled youths amongst them—will have to be weaned away from their foreign patrons and pay-masters and brought into the mainstream.
In KP—where the latest act of blood-letting has taken an enormous toll of innocent lives in Mardan, including that of a young, rookie, member of the provincial Assembly—the murderous bands of terrorists need to be convinced that the new government plans to get Pakistan out of America’s dubious ‘war on terrorism’ that has exacted a colossal toll of lives in Pakistan.
By the same token, Nawaz will be compelled—sooner or later—to come to grips with the power barons of Sindh and Karachi, in particular, who have been chiselling away at Jinnah’s legacy with as much brazen freedom as the terrorists.
The challenge that the mafioso MQM and a rapacious PPP, under Zardari’s thumb, pose to the sanctity of Pakistan is even more dangerous and menacing—in its potential—to the integrity of Pakistan than the scourge of the Taliban and their ilk.
Keeping Karachi in turmoil is perhaps the greatest affront to Jinnah’s bequest of an entity given to the rule of law. Karachi has become a wild west-like place because of the goons of MQM and their PPP counterparts from the dens of Lyari. Turf wars between the thugs and extortionists of these parties are making the lives of the people of Karachi a living hell. On the other hand, PPP and MQM are once again on the threshold of sharing power together to thumb their noses at Nawaz, whose plans for economic recovery of Pakistan will remain a hostage if there’s no peace in Karachi.
Nawaz may well opt for discretion as the better part of valour, in the short term, as far as Karachi is concerned. But postponing a day of reckoning with the tormentors of Karachi and its besieged people will only add to the ultimate cost of wresting the city of the Quaid from the blood-stained clutches of the goons and thugs lording over it.
Nawaz owes it to the legacy of the founder of Pakistan to reintegrate his (Quaid’s) city with a Pakistan rededicated to the rule of law and primacy of peace and tranquility in the lives of its people. His success or failure in this, third, term will be determined by it. - K_K_ghori@yahoo.com
(The writer is a former ambassador and career diplomat)
