The Quaid and the Robber Barons of Pakistan
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Totonto, Canada

 

Pakistan’s premier fugitive convict, discredited and disgraced former PM Nawaz Sharif seems to be enamoured of his own vapid rhetoric.

Commencing with his first, long-distance, salvo of load of invectives against Imran Khan and the military leadership at the Gujranwala public meeting of PDM, nearly two months ago, he has been regularly carrying on this charade from his hideout in London. The coward that he’s, one can’t expect him to return to Pakistan to lead the charge of the IK-hating, and military-bashing, brigade of discarded leaders in person. A son who doesn’t mind packing off his mother’s body, to be shipped to Pakistan as air-cargo for burial, can never be counted upon to have the moral grain to return home, as he should under the law, voluntarily.

But his rhetoric and verbal assault against Pakistan’s incumbent civil and military leaders is gaining mass from a safe distance. However, at Lahore’s meeting of PDM—which, according to most accounts fizzled out as a damp squib—Nawaz not only kept to the script of his previous tirades but crossed the limit. He had the gall to compare his self-centred agenda of personal bailout with the narrative of the Father of the nation, Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah.

It’s a weird cocktail of crooked and nationally discredited politicos that boasts of putting up a ‘united’ front, under the banner of Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) against IK and the GHQ khakis. However, out of the galaxy of 13 so-called national ‘leaders,’ only two—Bilawal Bhutto and Akhtar Mengal—are part of the current parliament. The rest, eleven of them, have no office and represent only themselves.

To underline the ‘theatre-of-the-absurd’ nature of this motley group, its leader, Maulana Fazl-ur-Rehman, was soundly trounced in the 2018 general elections. That highlights the real nature of this circus travelling from city to city, with total lack of concern and apathy to its contribution in spreading the contagion of Covid-19. It’s sour-grapes for this bunch of vengeful politicians with a single-line agenda: they’d like to settle scores with IK and his alleged mentors in the military establishment.

But a puny upstart, midget of a leader like Nawaz, giving himself so much airs as to put himself on par with the founder of Pakistan, takes a huge leap of daring.

The Quaid was a modicum of civility. It wasn’t his friends and admirers only that admired his quality of being a fearless and astute leader; even his detractors and enemies praised his uprightness. Members of the Cabinet Mission, whose efforts to keep India united were sabotaged by the Congress leaders, were at one in praising Jinnah’s unimpeachable character. He (Jinnah) was so honest, they said, that none could purchase him; he was so astute that none could intimidate him; and he was so upright that none could mislead him.

The Quaid’s law-abiding quality was legendary. He never gave in to any kind of blandishment, pressure or intimidation to budge from his demand of Pakistan, once that his political rivals—from Congress and the pack of obscurantist mullahs arrayed against him—had foreclosed all other options for him. But he never violated any of the laws of India’s colonial rulers, even when he didn’t agree with them entirely.

That was the principal reason that MA Jinnah never landed in a jail in India—not even for a day. This was in marked contrast to the regular landings of Congress leaders—Gandhi, Nehru, Azad et al.—in jail because they defied the laws of the land.

The Quaid’s detractors accused him—some still do, including some sell-out self-anointed gurus of Pakistani intelligentsia with a hostile bent against the Father of the Nation—that he lacked the guts to take on the colonial establishment. That’s hogwash.

Jinnah had unflinching faith in the righteousness of his cause. Nothing could deviate him from his noble mission. Ergo, he felt no need to defy any law. He was fighting a legal case on behalf of the Muslims of India. He was, in his own words, the Pleader for Pakistan, not a crusader or fighter. Why should he, the quintessential lawyer, take the law in his own hands. That he, ultimately, won his case without breaking any laws vindicated him. His legacy of a law-abiding politician and leader has outlived him, to this day and will live forever as a glorious legacy of his.

Nawaz, arrogating to himself the right to stand on the Quaid’s illustrious platform, is a convicted man, declared too corrupt and compromised to hold any office of responsibility by the Supreme Court of Pakistan. On top of it, he has become a proclaimed offender and fugitive from law by Islamabad High Court because he brazenly continues to defy the court orders to return to Pakistan, which he had left on spurious grounds. It must take a lot of gall for a habitual law-breaker like Nawaz to claim that his traits were those of the Quaid—law-abiding to a fault.

Jinnah’s pecuniary probity set an example for his followers to emulate. That they failed him doesn’t downgrade or delegitimize his legacy. He made tons of money as one of the most outstanding practitioners of law in India but never developed a lust for money. His biographers are there to corroborate that as Governor-General of Pakistan, he drew a salary of Rupee one, only, and paid for all the household expenses of his residence from his own pocket.

Now, compare his sterling qualities of head and heart, his financial astuteness, and his great political legacy with that of an upstart Nawaz.

An accidental leader, Nawaz, as every student of Pakistan’s history knows, gate-crashed into politics on the shoulders of the very military establishment he now has the gall to repudiate. Jinnah was a man of character, Nawaz is not. Jinnah, who never leaned on others’ shoulders to rise to stardom.

It was unthinkable of him to stoop down to the level of a thief and rob the nation of its wealth. He wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth but didn’t succumb to the temptation of making money on the lam. Nawaz, the son of a lowly iron-smith, lusted for pelf, along with power, from the day he was inducted into power on the crutches of the military establishment. The robber-baron has used political heft only to amass billions of dollars stolen from Pakistan.

Most of the political actors and characters ganging up against IK and the establishment are men of straw whose political pedigree can be traced to those who opposed Jinnah, tooth-and-nail, when he was struggling against innumerable odds to win Pakistan.

The most notorious pedigree is of the arch-chameleon, Fazl-ur-Rehman. He helped himself to billions, from funds allocated to Parliament’s Kashmir Committee, which he headed for twenty years doing nothing. His father, Mufti Mehmood, was amongst those guardians of Islamic faith who denounced Jinnah for not being a ‘proper’ Muslim according to their myopic interpretation of Islam, and defiantly opposed the idea of Pakistan. Even, as an active participant in Pakistani politics—after Jinnah’s vision had become the reality of Pakistan—Mufti Mehmood wouldn’t recant or resile from publicly taking pride in his shameful anti-Pakistan track record.

With such dubious and shaded credentials, these congenital detractors of the concept of Pakistan should be the last to have any claim on guarding Pakistan’s democratic moorings. And, yet, they have the cheek to hawk themselves as such and challenge IK and the military leadership—which rightly stands behind him as the lawfully elected leader of Pakistan—to abdicate power in their favour, or else. Or, else what?

• The gang of dynastic robber-barons of Pakistan is threatening to march to Islamabad if their arm-twisting yields no result by the end of January, next year; they have lobbed their challenge into IK’s court. It’s his move, now, to call their bluff. This is the least he could do to register his homage to the impeccable legacy of the Quaid. - K_K_ghori@hotmail.com

• (The author is a former ambassador and career diplomat)