You could be forgiven for thinking the Osama drama would have chastened people this side of Abbottabad but beware before you lay any claim.
It is one thing to see a few hundred protestors well up in a militant outfit-inspired gathering and clean-shaven black coats offering ghaibana namaz-e-janaza for the mass murderer but quite another when MPs offer fateha as was the case in the National Assembly on a Private Members Day but there you have it.
When Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Nazaryati’s Maulvi Asmatullah was questioned about his daidh eent (loosely translated “unique”) act, he explained it was the done thing for a fellow Muslim.
If only it was all that simple.
JUI(F)’s Maulana Atta-ur-Rehman and Laiq Khan, PML(Q)’s Shahjihan Yousuf and some others joined him in trying to beseech peace for the departed. All this while, Faisal Karim Kundi, Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly, watched agape but could do little to stop the spiritual blitz.
It took PPP’s Khursheed Shah to ask the obvious and that, too, in a whisper: “What are you doing?” Precisely, the question we have all been asking of khakis and civvies since May 2, which came 31 days too late for us to imagine it had anything to do with the All Fools enterprise.
Fast forward to the much-touted historic day, which dawned the day before yesterday — Friday, May 13, 2011. A new dawn or not — and as a Pakistani, who has seen many of its false varieties I have my doubts — it was significant nevertheless.
My generation of Pakistanis is in the afternoon of their lives and seriously, one never fancied a day would dawn when even a second-tier individual from the security establishment would have to be answerable to a civilian government for his or her acts of omission let alone the DG ISI. If all that we heard of Friday’s drama is real, then may be everyone could do a Maulvi Asmatullah — but for the Yankees as opposed to OBL — for bringing it to pass!
However, the first ominous signs that this is unlikely to be the real deal emerged with Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani’s insipid fare coming to the hour of reckoning. Ordering an inquiry that simply went along with the military’s half-hearted attempt and chosen officer was the least of inspired humour.
Still the in-camera (de)briefing at the joint sitting of the parliament briefing was a godsend but once again the PPP government flunked. Incorrigible romantics of the old PPP given to the party’s anti-establishment moorings may have fancied here was an opportunity to ring a paradigm shift and move back the cheese to where it should belong but alas!
It reminded me of the Kabhi Kabhi meanderings of Amitabh Bachchan’s broken heart:
Magar yeh ho na saka aur ab ye aalam hai
Ke tu nahin, tera gham, teri justajoo bhi nahin
(But it didn’t happen and such is circumstance now
That I don’t have you, neither sorrow nor hope)
Sadly, Asif Zardari’s PPP appears to have abandoned its ideology in favour of a one-point agenda: complete its five-year term and build on the gains in its wake with an eye on snatching Punjab, the real bastion of power in the next polls.
The party is so focused on this objective that it has willingly frittered away the best chance civvies could ever have hoped for to bring the military under civilian control. This is ironical considering it has been the bane of PPP governments throughout history.
In fact, the irony is worse confounded given that Zardari could have sought — and won — crucial support from Nawaz Sharif, who has stuck to his stand about civilian supremacy ever since his ouster from power in 1999.
It is apparent that Zardari’s PPP has taken a well considered decision to not only stay out of harm’s way — real or imagined — but to make keep the powerful establishment on its side.
A failed attempt at the beginning of its latest stint to bring the ISI under the thumb of the Interior Ministry and the proposal of a no-first use of nuclear strike with India caused such annoyance in the military establishment that the president probably decided he had had enough of politics of bravado.
Subsequently, his government became the first civilian dispensation to give a full extension to a retiring army chief before also prolonging the ISI chief’s tenure!
It would seem the PPP’s low profile is a studied contrast to PML(N)’s vociferous criticism of the army and the intelligence apparatus. Given that the only viable alternative to the PPP is PML(N), it isn’t difficult to figure out what Zardari’s intended message for the khakis is.
However, more likely the military establishment may be only biding time before reasserting themselves once they are out of the mire. I, for one, wouldn’t read too much into Friday, the 13th.
The writer is a newspaper editor based in Islamabad and can be reached at [email protected]
