Another Visit to Pakistan

As political and social unrest mounts in Pakistan with the passage of time and I embark on yet another visit to the "homeland," grappling with a swarm of misgivings, I always seem to end up with a feeling that there is still hope. Those elements and forces that are driving the country to the brink can be stopped in their tracks one day provided of course "the age of catastrophes" we are in, according to Eric Hobsbawm, does not put an end to everything prematurely. The reason for this optimism, misplaced as it may very well be, is the older and younger Pakistanis I continue to have the opportunity to meet who are keeping the vision of Pakistan as a peaceful, enlightened and progressive society alive. So it was this time when I left Canada for Pakistan on 22 November, 02, with war drums sounding loud and clear from across the border in America.

Breaking journey in London I was in the hospitable company of Pakistanis for Peace and Alternative Development (PPAD), Ayyub Malik, Ahmed Shibli and visiting Arif Hasan with whom one can always share convictions about the necessity of peace, social justice, human equality, tolerance and pluralism to make life worth living in Pakistan, South Asia and the world. During three days of their busy time, we were even able to attend an educational meeting in a London Mosque to listen to a post-modernist spin on the thesis of "clash of civilizations."

At the Karachi airport an old friend, Nadera Ahmed had come to take me home for a three day stay. Nadera is carrying on the work of late Dr. Feroz Ahmed, an esteemed colleague and Marxist scholar/activist, in her own way. She has single-handedly used her personal resources to establish a school in a low income neighbourhood of Karachi and a modern institute of mass communication at the Karachi University campus bearing the name of Dr. Feroz Ahmed. A functionally and esthetically well designed building for the institute is almost complete and has caught the imagination of the ministry of education which is promising to make it a state of the art place of learning journalism and broadcasting.

Thanks to Nadera’s hospitality and contacts, I was able to meet at a short notice some of the most dedicated people of Karachi working for progressive causes, among them Owais Hasin of PPAD, Rahat Saeed of the Irtiqa Institute, senior journalist N. B. Naqvi, elder sociologist/writer Hamza Alavi, the young director of the Pakistan Studies Centre, Karachi University, Syed Jaffar Ahmed and many others. There was much to be learned from their first hand knowledge of the situation in Pakistan which at the moment represents a precarious political patchwork being threatened from within and without to fall apart any time..

In Lahore a more organized effort was on to launch a new democratic party/movement of the left to meet the challenges of mass depredations caused by globalization, militarism, religious fanaticism and lawlessness. A circle of dedicated political workers, journalists, academics and other professionals has been meeting regularly to prepare the ground for this purpose. A discussion paper produced by Professor Aziz-ud-Din Ahmed is already in circulation and work is underway to bring out a periodical to serve as an instrument of coordinating public input (The group can be contacted through Liaqat ALI, P.O. Box 917, GPO, Lahore).

My introduction to this group took place as a guest speaker invited to speak on the topic of the genesis of war on Afghanistan launched by the United States and its coalition partners in pursuit of al-Qaeda terrorists and their Taliban hosts, a monstrosity created by the United States itself to begin with in the name of Jehad against the Soviet Union.

The left intellectuals and activists in Islamabad were also bracing to confront the political farce perpetrated on the people of Pakistan by the military rulers in the form of October, 2002 elections and subsequent maneuverings, a situation which promises to get worse as the country bears the brunt of United States imminent war on Iraq. I was introduced to these people as I was invited to speak at a largely attended seminar on December 13, chaired by Dr. A. H. Nayyer held at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI). I was asked to address the question, "Can American Unilateralism be Contained." Putting the question in the context of Bush administration’s domestic politics of fear mongering and its foreign policy of threats, arm twisting and bribery, I could find little reason to believe that The United states will deviate from its openly declared imperialist agenda of defining "axses of evil," waging wars of conquest, occupying countries and controlling their oil and other resources. The "war on terrorism" and exploitation of the tragedy of 9/11 is merely an excuse to do what the United States did covertly before under pretenses of international cooperation and consent. Now "you are with the United States or against it," on its own terms.

By the end of the two hour seminar a consensus had developed among the participants that the only viable resistance to American unilateralism can come from a unity of peace and left forces on a global level. The religious and jehadi forces could not play a critical role as their strategies were backward looking and self destructive. As I left the venue of the seminar, some organizers of the meeting had stayed behind to plan a major demonstration against the US determination to attack Iraq. They were proposing to form a human chain to connect the twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi as part of their demonstration.

The flurry of left activity in Pakistan I observed had perhaps something to do with the warning signals arising from the electoral gains of the conglomerate of Islamist parties , the Mutahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) in the October elections, an outcome that has been interpreted by some as a major turning point to the right in Pakistan’s electoral politics. The total rout of the Awami National Party (ANP) in the provincial elections of NWFP, the only party with professed leftist credentials in Pakistan which had shown some capacity in the past to use the instruments of electoral politics to some tangible advantage, could surely be seen as an alarming prospect for the left as for as its influence can be measured through the ballot box.

But electoral politics in Pakistan is by no means a normal indicator of public preferences for political parties or blocks. Each time a military dictator engineers the electoral process to suit his compulsion of political survival, new and more grotesque distortions are introduced in the body politics of Pakistan. The Musharraf regime manifestly broke all previous records of manipulating elections. The General used his sole discretion to introduce 29 amendments to the 1973 constitution, a document already tempered with badly by his military predecessor Gen. Zia. He put the intelligence agencies into overdrive to create the so called king’s party, Pakistan Muslim League Qaid-e-Azam (PML-Q), and he disqualified a number of known politicians from contesting elections on charges of corruption, while allowing others under similar and worse indictments to run in return for pledged loyalty to his regime (a number of these erstwhile condemned men now occupy important ministerial positions in the federal and provincial cabinets).

By the time I reached Pakistan the results of the October elections were being largely ignored by people in general, while those among the politically aware were inclined to dismiss the whole exercise as a farce, except for the electoral gains made by the MMA. Whatever the combination of reasons that have resulted in the upstaging of MMA, and these have been analyzed from every angle by now, there is no denying the fact that the long standing symbiotic relationship between the Pakistan Army and the jehadi Islam has moved to a new phase. The power of the maulanas, jehadi or otherwise, is now ensconced in the formal structure of the state along with that of the military, bureaucracy and the propertied classes ( popularly known as feudal). This however does not mean that the maulanas are any closer to create a Taliban style theocratic state in Pakistan. There are several reasons for this.

To begin with the MMA conglomerate is not an Islamist monolith. It consists on the one extreme of the two factions of Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI), the professed fundamentalists and patrons of the Taliban and on the other a political faction of the heterodox shiites who have borne the brunt of fundamentalist inspires massacres. In between is the leader of the pack, the Jamat-e- Islami, with modernist tendencies whose well-healed notables have no qualms sending their sons and daughters to institutions of modern education at home and abroad.

Even Maulana Fazlur Rehman of the puritanical JUI is not averse to accumulating worldly wealth and power enjoying a secure position in the transport and drug maffia of Sarhad, which has earned him the popular nick name of Maulana Diesel. As MMA’s chosen candidate for prime ministership of Pakistan, the Maulana was bending backwards to assure that "we are ready to work with General Musharraf." (Dawn, Oct. 27, 02). In his eagerness to dispel the ferociously intolerant Islamist communal image of his party, the Maulana was even citing the JUI’s pre-partition ties with the Indian National Congress through its parent organization, the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Hind of Deoband.

No wonder than that on my arrival in Pakistan the post-electoral scene, with no party with absolute electoral majority in the central or provincial assemblies except that of the NWFP, had been transformed into a grand show or tamasha. With principles and promises thrown to the wind all party leaders big and small were seeking to form a government or be part of a government by playing an endless game of negotiations, compromises, shadow boxing, horse trading, and party switching. All this spectacle was being watched, perhaps with some sense of amusement or apprehension by General Musharraf, having been sworn in earlier as president for the next five years with unprecedented state powers.

The Pakistan Peoples party (Parlimentarian) PPPP with largest number of seats in Sindh was to be kept out of power at all costs but any other odd combination was acceptable so long as its loyalty to the military president could be trusted. The funniest part of the show was that the members-elect of MMA along with those of the PPPP and PML(Nawaz), having made all the noises of refusal to be sworn into the parliament under the Legal Framework Order (LFO) decreed by President Musharraf finally queued up quietly to take oath under the disfigured Constitution of 1973 in which the LFO was fully incorporated.

What all this means is that the biggest surprise of the October election, the emergence of MMA as a major block in the national parliament and a ruling party in NWFP, did not turn out to be such a surprise after all. Some people did vote for this conglomerate in the hope that it will address the horrendous problems of poverty of the masses and hardships of the middle classes made worse by religious extremism and violence, as promised in its election manifesto. But they are likely to discover that it too is not going to deliver anything other than the Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif elected governments had to offer. Neither has the MMA used its electoral gains to pose any challenge to Pakistan’s participation in the US led coalition against "war on terrorism," although it did cash in on the anti-American sentiments in the aftermath of US attack and occupation of Afghanistan. One must also remember that the Jamat-e-Islami, the most vocal component of MMA has a long history of cooperation with the United States dating back to the Cold War days. So far the priorities voiced by the MMA central leadership and its NWFP government consist of changing the weekend holiday from Sunday back to Friday, banning co- education, closing down the cable TV and cinema houses, banning the playing of audio and video cassettes in the buses and halting public transport vehicles at prayer times if any passenger wishes to say his prayers. If the setting of these priorities is any indication of MMA’s much trumpeted commitment to democracy and social justice, one can imagine its future strength in Pakistan’s politics.

What else did I experience during three weeks of stay in Pakistan this time? Here are a few impressions offered with due apologies to those who consider my comments not very patriotic.

I found the customs and immigration clearance less of a hassle compared to the 1990s and earlier visits for some reason, although any bottle that shows up in the baggage x-ray is suspected to be brimming with "wine." There is also little to suggest that you are under surveillance by FBI agents looking for terrorists at busy airports. The clouds of dust, smoke and fumes (made worse by the constant burning of plastic shopping bags ) are now an integral part of the air fellow- Pakistanis breath with little concern. The way one is driven zig zag around a myriad of vehicles on the city roads is indeed a marvel of navigation.

Much of my visit this time was spent in Multan where I had gone to condole with my sister on the death of her young son. It was the tail end of the month of Ramazan and the mosque loud speakers blaring at all hours of the night robbed everyone of sleep. Days were spent with family friends and relatives dropping in, with small talk invariably turning to speculations on which scion of which prominent clan was going to become a cabinet minister and which one was going to be left out.

Something new this time was a question on the lips of every other relative, acquaintance, shopkeeper or office Clark: What is the plight of Pakistanis in America? The question was often accompanied by a horror story of some body known to the questioner who had suffered at the hands of US security and immigration police in the land of the free. In Lahore my nephew, a surgeon, informed me that a number of his medical colleagues who had been practicing in the United States had suddenly returned. A blessing in disguise for Pakistani patients? My nephew felt sorry for these returnees and their families who were having "adjustment problems." You have to grow up here and stay here if you want to enjoy what this city has to offer, he added mischievously. I had to agree, of course, having disembarked from a modern buss run by a Korean company watching Lollywood movies on board all the way, thanks to an MMA free Punjab!