- And the long, long hangover
More than four decades after Gen Zia’s Operation Fair Play, the carefully planned coup d’état that removed, quite literally, the country’s most popular elected prime minister, the former dictator’s legacy remains toxic and divisive, besides still casting a long shadow over the country. From buy-and-sell politics of opportunism to relocating the bulk of society to the extreme right of centre to radical ‘shariaisation’ of the constitution and factories that still make mullah-clerics; most of Pakistan’s bigger problems find their roots in the long, fateful Zia years.
The torchbearers of democracy in the west had little problem with a punishing military dictatorship in a strategic South Asian country just as soon as their interests were aligned. They began going soft on Zia just as Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan on Christmas Day 1979. Then, of course, a deep relationship developed in the Regan years; one that would change the shape of the region forever. But for all the laurels Zia won in Washington – for Pakistan’s help in ‘bleeding the Soviets by a thousand cuts’ – the country paid dearly for the ‘strategic depth’. Millions of Afghan refugees, drug and Kalashnikov culture, unending conflict across the Durand Line, and politicians manufactured by the military, unfortunately, were the collective price Pakistani society had to pay for Zia’s big prize.
When one man, clothed in absolute power, lords over the fate of an entire nation he, inevitably, leaves his fingerprints all over its DNA. Zia’s own paranoia, born out of a long and illegitimate rule, and the use of religion to whitewash the murder of not just democracy but also a prime minister, slowly began reflecting in society as a whole. Pakistan, as a result of Zia’s policies, became a far more corrupt, intolerant, violent and xenophobic place than before. Even now, as people prepare to go to the polls, they will find the electorate still riddled with the faces thrust upon us by Zia’s political machine. It will, it seems, still be a while before the country is able to shrug off the ghost of Gen Zia.
