Straight-talk
Hope’s Last Frontier in Pakistan
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada
Those of us old enough — and not necessarily grisly or jaded ---to trace back our memories of US to the late 1960—1968, to be precise --- would remember the presidential race of that year in which Richard Nixon, the Republican, was pitted against Hubert Humphrey, the Democrat.
Nixon was the front-runner despite his reputation of a wheeler-dealer. A pungent Democratic attack-ad against Nixon taunted the American voters with the question: ‘Would you buy a used car from this man?’ The same question could very aptly be asked of Pakistanis about their incumbent president.
The main Republican television ad, which ran on all major television channels, had a more intelligent and positive ring about it: it showed a very pregnant African-American woman with a bold slogan plastered on her swollen belly that said: ‘This time vote as if your whole world depended on it.’ Nixon won by a landslide.
Of course there was an air of exaggeration — amply blown in the woman’s bloated belly — about the Republican ad. US democracy has roots so well embedded in the American psyche that nothing foreseeable could weaken them.
But why I think of that particular ad from a 45-year-old election campaign from another era is because it could be used with impeccable justification in the current election battlefield of Pakistan. Democracy’s future in Pakistan is at stake. Nay, much more than that it’s Pakistan’s structural resilience as a state that seems to be at stake; which quite well makes it a make-or-break kind of elections for the future of Pakistan.
The stakes, quite frankly, couldn’t be greater than they are in the elections due less than two weeks from now. Shorn of every other angle or consideration, it’s a contest between status quo and change; between traditional practitioners of spoils-based politics of exploitation (of people) and loot (by robber-barons), on the one side of the arena, and the standard-bearer of the nation’s aspirations to get done with this archaic and endemically corrupt system, on the other.
The status-quo parties are not only those which stood by Zardari through the thick and thin of his reign of plunder and loot — the ignoble collaborators being MQM, ANP and the Quisling League of Gujrat’s notorious Chaudhris. But the list doesn’t exhaust itself at these three musketeers of Zardari: it also includes the Muslim League (N) faction dominated by Lahore’s Shareef duo, Nawaz and Shahbaz.
For window-dressing, largely, ML (N) touted itself as the main opposition to the PPP robber-baron cabal and thieving collaborators. Its tribunes desperately tried to hawk their credentials as keeping watch at the ramparts of democracy. However, it didn’t take a genius to see through their deception. The Sharif Brothers may have blown hot-and-cold against the Zardari circus of loot but they were, at best, a very friendly pair of opponents who took pains to ensure that Zardari not only survived the past five years but, in fact, also thrived in them.
The Sharif Brothers can’t convince anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of Pakistan’s arcane and macabre game of politics that they were in opposition to Zardari. It would be a very hard sell, if not an impossible one. It categorically pointed to some tacit understanding between them to alternate in power and not upset each other’s apple cart.
The flag of change, in the true sense of the term, is only in the hands of Imran Khan and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI). Of all the political actors currently strutting on the Pakistani electoral scene, Imran is the only one with an untainted past and a clean, impeccable, record.
In fact, PTI of Imran doesn’t have a past. It hasn’t been in the political arena for very long; 17 or 18 years, in all, that it has been in reckoning. It has never been in power or shared the spoils of it as so many others claiming to speak on behalf of the people of Pakistan have, with obvious abandon, and in abundance.
For this one reason alone — a party without a past to be accountable for — it deserves to be taken seriously when Imran and colleagues speak of change.
An old friend with a keen perception of Pakistani and global politics, phoned me the other day and posed the question: ‘Don’t you think Imran is where Obama was in 2008 when he’d unfurled his mantra of change and galvanised an American voting public with his bracing slogan, Yes We Can?’
I couldn’t be more in agreement with my friend’s political insight.
Obama was able to whip up a cult following behind him, and his call for real change found so much resonance and traction with his American audience, largely because mainstream US was wearied and fed up with the idiocies and wastefulness of the Bush (Dubya) era. The Americans were looking for change and Obama had the savvy to capitalise on their hunger for a harbinger of change.
Not necessarily borrowing a leaf from Obama’s book, Imran’s target audience in Pakistan is also its mainstream. Pakistan is young, in terms of its demography. 70 percent of the Pakistanis are below 35 years. This is the generation — young, green and callow —t hat Imran is trying to harvest, and rightly so.
The younger generation of Pakistanis has suffered much worse under the thieving barons of Zardari — all other political actors who strengthened his hands — than the older generations. The robber-barons, with their wholesale plunder of the country’s precious resources, have literally robbed the youths of Pakistan of a future.
What’s there for an ordinary Pakistani youth, not born in privilege or wealth, to look forward to in a country turned into a basket case by the thugs ruling over it?
The average Pakistani youth, fresh from college or university, finds himself in a dark tunnel if he doesn’t have a resourceful father or a well-connected uncle, to land him a decent job. However, with Imran’s entry into active politics, the youth sees a ray of hope at the end of that dark tunnel.
Of course only the naïve and simpleton would minimise the enormity of the challenge ahead of Imran and all those pinning their hopes on his leadership to turn the things around in a country hobbled with a plethora of problems bequeathed to them by errant leaders.
Knowing his ability to galvanize the youth and line them up behind him, a massive campaign — high-pitched and hysterical — has been kicked off to paint Imran in the ugliest colours and question his credentials. The purveyors of status-quo and denizens of the ancient regime are mounting their backlash on more than one front.
Some very obliging television anchors and TV channels, known for their servility to their local and foreign paymasters, have been pressed into service to character assassinate Imran and PTI. Simultaneously, tailor-made and doctored surveys and public opinion polls are being flaunted with gusto to highlight the ascending popularity graph of Mian Nawaz Sharif. The two-term (and failed) PM is being projected as a shoo-in to don the mantle of a third crack at the job for which he was never cut out, in the first place, nor is qualified to measure up to it now that Pakistan’s problems have compounded, exponentially.
This is a kind of psychological warfare against PTI and Imran. But the real target of the snide media campaign is to unhinge the Pakistani youths’ confidence and trust in the man they perceive as a messenger of change.
Even the so-called ‘powerful’ Election Commission has been dove-tailed into the status-quo’s backlash against the forces of change. Of course the EC, with Fakhroo-Bhai at its apex, has joined hands with the likes of Zardari and Nawaz Sharif of its own volition.
This scribe had cautioned in a number of his Urdu language columns not to blow the trumpets of Fakhroo Bhai’s non-partisan credentials. He owes much of his past glory — and consequential prominence — to offices gifted to him by the Bhutto clan. On top of it, he’s a burnt-out bullet, if he ever was one. No wonder the Zardari-Sharif nexus had no qualms in jointly promoting Fakhroo-Bhai as the man best suited to deliver the goods. And delivering he’s, there’s no doubt, to the utmost of their satisfaction. Damn the forces of change and damn the people of Pakistan. For him old is still gold.
EC is faithfully working up to the fine print of the script laid out for it by the denizens of status quo. All those black sheep earlier weeded out by low-level, but conscientious, returning officers, have been given the green light by sympathetic appellate judges. This ignoble list includes the likes of Raja Rental and Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar with their mountains of corruption not spotted by myopic appellate officers.
But the youths of Pakistan still have it in their grasp to outsmart the grisly predators sheltering in the status quo camp. All they need to do is turn out, in their full strength, on May 11 to prove the Cassandras wrong. The frontier of change is within their reach. Hope is there to guide them to it. Nixon’s inspiring slogan still has validity for the youths of Pakistan: Vote as if your whole world depended on it.
And for equally good measure, the Pakistani young need to remind themselves of Obama’s clarion call of 2008: Yes, We Can. Yes, we can make a New Pakistan.
- K_K_ghori@yahoo.com
(The writer is a former ambassador and career diplomat)
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