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Pakistan: more of the same?

The elections in Pakistan today for the 272 National Assembly seats and four Provincial Assemblies are perhaps the most lacklustre in the country’s history. The people remain uncertain as to whether they would be free and fair although everyone, including the observers, remains clueless as to how they might be rigged. The fear of suicidal attacks has virtually eliminated the fun from the exercise as people are reluctant to attend meetings and rallies. Workers are sometimes dragged to the meetings against the wishes of their loved ones. Benazir Bhutto’s assassination has taken the colour out of politics, and the boycott by Jamaati Islami, Imran Khan and some of the Baloch nationalist parties has diluted the election campaign even more.

Pakistan never had it so bad. It is difficult to say who should be blamed for this malaise. The one person who comes to mind is President Pervez Musharraf who, for no reason other than remaining in power for more than eight years, should take most of the blame. The military should also be answerable as it supported him all this time. The Western powers led by President George Bush gave him wholehearted support and the country ended up in a big mess. Politicians lack public support and corruption is rampant. When voting gets under way today, perhaps they will remember the old saying about voting for the man who promises the least; he will disappoint the least.

It should not then be surprising that 38 per cent of Pakistanis want to emigrate, according to a recent Gallup survey. This is the number of people who would like to settle abroad permanently. An overwhelming 62 per cent would like at least to work abroad. The scenario is hardly reflective of an economy in which the growth rate is stated to be one of the highest in Asia.

A common sight now are long queues of people waiting to get a sack of flour or a tin of cooking oil. Unabated load shedding is at its peak, and inflation has virtually crushed the common man, particularly the over 60 per cent of the populace that is surviving on less than $2 a day. This is hardly a situation in which the PML (Pakistan Muslim League-Q), a creation of General Musharraf that ruled the country after the 2002 elections and is led by Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, Mushahid Hussain and Chaudhry Pervez Elahi, can take pride. The artificial boom created by more than $nine billion pouring into the economy following 9/11 has benefited only a small fraction. Millions continue to be unemployed and poverty stricken.

The opposition led by former Prime Ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif remained almost paralysed during most of the past five years; the religious parties were in a peculiar position as their alliance was in power in two of the provinces, Balochistan and the North-West Frontier Province, and was in fact part of the coalition government in the former, but its leader, Fazlur Rehman of the JUI-F, was the leader of the opposition at the Centre in the National Assembly.

Benazir spent most of the time either attending to her lawyers who were handling dozens of corruption cases against her and her husband, Asif Zardari, in Pakistan, Switzerland and some other European countries, or on a whirlwind lecturing tour in the States. Mr. Sharif spent most of the years quietly meeting his party leaders who could visit him in Saudi Arabia while doing their umra.

Matters brightened for the opposition with the advent of 2007. The year started with the Islamic fundamentalists taking over a children’s library in Islamabad; this was followed by moral policing by the students of the Lal Masjid, culminating in a bloody crackdown by the military that resulted in many casualties on both sides. Many blamed President Musharraf and his intelligence agencies for letting the situation deteriorate. The conversion of the mosque into a virtual fortress guarded by militant students must have taken less than a few years; there was no way it could have happened in the capital without the cooperation of the law-enforcing authorities. The opposition exploited the situation.

President Musharraf’s worst blunder was perhaps the sacking of the Supreme Court Chief Justice in March 2007. This was a golden opportunity for the opposition to strike at the regime but it miserably failed to make use of the situation, despite the fact that the legal community throughout the country was united and agitating against Gen. Musharraf. The situation worsened for the government when the Chief Justice was restored by the Supreme Court in July but by then Benazir was fully immersed in a dialogue with the government that the media referred to as a ‘deal,’ and which enabled her to return to Pakistan in October. It is a different matter that it turned out to be a fatal decision.

However, at that time, it split the opposition to Musharraf. The movement, if there was any, by the opposition fizzled out which emboldened the President to sack once again not just the Chief Justice but more than 60 judges of the Supreme Court and the High Courts by imposing an Emergency in November and asking all superior court judges to take a fresh oath under a new provisional constitutional order.

There is no doubt that everybody in Pakistan is in shock after Benazir’s assassination, particularly the Pakistan People’s Party supporters. However, there is also little doubt that the party’s scope to win the elections brightened only after the tragic incident. The PPP, now led by Asif Ali Zardari, has been acting as if it has already come to power. Its leaders have started day dreaming about the ministries they would be occupying.

Sindh, with 61 seats in the National Assembly, is its bastion which has been the case since the party’s inception in 1967. The PPP would have won most of the seats in interior Sindh even if Benazir had not been assassinated. However, the murder has sealed the fate of its opponents.

The PPP is likely to win comfortably, except for the urban seats mostly based in Karachi and Hyderabad where the MQM, representing the Mohajirs, will sweep the polls. The Mohajirs remain the mainstay of President Musharraf’s support, which is a reflection of the country being divided on clear ethnic lines; the Sindhis supporting the Bhuttos and the Mohajirs behind the President whose family migrated from Delhi.

There are only two Hindu-dominated districts in the whole of Pakistan: Umerkot and Tharparkar, both in Sindh. The PPP may lose a few seats here , despite being popular among the minority communities for standing up against the religious forces in the past. This may have less to do with the PPP’s popularity and more to do with the hold of the feudal forces in the regions.

Nawaz Sharif and his brother Shahbaz Sharif, who was the Chief Minister of the important province of Punjab, are back from their exile. It would now be interesting to see their impact on the Punjab polity which has traditionally been their stronghold, along with the Hazara belt of the Frontier Province.

One of the reasons this election is hard to predict is it is difficult to tell who will cut into whose votes: the policies of the PPP and Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N have now become impossible to differentiate. The difference lies only in personalities and ethnic backgrounds. So it is possible that they may cut into each other’s vote banks depending upon the candidates; the other situation is one in which the sympathy wave following Benazir’s assassination may sweep the PML-N off its feet or the Punjabi factor associated with the Sharif leadership may cut into the sympathy wave.

The elections are reportedly costing the country more than Rs. 200 billion. But the irony is that they are not going to change anything. The real power will remain in the hands of the forces that have retained it for most of the past 60 years.

(The writer is an advocate of the Pakistan Supreme Court.)

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