Should Pakistan, too, Dump the Commonwealth?

The recent Commonwealth Summit in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, was dominated, almost entirely, by the issue of Zimbabwe. It ended, in befitting style, with President Mugabe of Zimbabwe saying, ‘pox to your house’, and deciding to dump the world’s most exclusive ‘club.’

In the din of the heated debate over whether or not Zimbabwe, suspended from the Commonwealth at the last summit, should be allowed to return to its fold, a similar issue concerning Pakistan was shoved to the sidelines. Pakistan’s membership of the ‘club’ has likewise been in suspended animation for more than four years since General Musharraf seized power in October, 1999. In the end, the sentiment against removing the ban from Pakistan prevailed and carried the day. It was decided to keep Islamabad still in a limbo.

The charge against Zimbabwe has been led, all these years, by the ‘white Commonwealth’—Britain, Australia, New Zeland and Canada. Mugabe is being punished because he dared to challenge the century-and-a-half chokehold of the white farmers over much of Zimbabwe’s best agricultural lands. These pampered farmers—descendants of white settlers when Zimbabwe was colonised as Rhodesia—owned nearly 95 per cent of rich agricultural farm lands, although they made up about 3 per cent of Zimbabwe’s population. They kept the old tenancy system in vogue and trashed the rights of their black farm labour.

The likes of Tony Blair and John Howard ( of Australia ), cronies of George W. Bush, cried ‘foul’ the moment Mugabe announced plans to redistribute the farm lands and do away with chronic injustice to his teeming black farmers. The BBC, otherwise professing to be a purveyor of truth and justice, immediately took up cudgels on behalf of this ‘white’ backlash against Mugabe’s reforms. Mugabe returned the compliment by showing BBC the door because of its tendentious and scurrilous reporting on Zimbabwe.

Of course Mugabe is no saint, or a model democrat. He has turned his country, for whose independence from colonial bondage hestruggled and fought valiantly, into an autocratic fiefdom. But he is his peopl’e elected president and represents the sentiments of millions of poor and groaning Zimbabweans.

The question posed by his banishment from the ‘club’ is, does he become autocratic because he has become a bete noir in the eyes of Blair and Howard? And does it make Zimbabwe undemocratic if the white Commonwealth or the European Union says the elections he held on his watch in Zimbabwe were rigged? Do Blair and Howard retain their democratic credentials after both of them defied the well-articulated wishes of their peoples and took their countries into the illegal ‘Bush’ war against Iraq?

Ironically, the yard-stick of democracy for a country’s membership of the Commonwealth was coined in Zimbabwe itself at the ‘club’s’ 1991 summit in Harare. In another irony, it was Nigeria—which played host to the recent summit—which became the first ‘victim’ of the democracy litmus test in 1995 when power there was seized by the army. Nigeria returned to the fold in 1999. But the same year Pakistan was banished from the club after its own military coup d’etat.

Pakistan’s return to the Commonwealth’s fold is being kept on hold because some other club members think that Pakistan doesn’t, still, fulfill the criteria for lifting the ban from it. This is despite the obvious rehabilitation of parliamentary democracy in Pakistan. It now boasts of an elected parliament at the centre, as also in each of its four provinces, and a prime minister elected by the parliament. So what is the beef against Pakistan?

The beef is that General Musharraf is still wearing two hats on his head—that of the president and the chief of army staff. Therefore, in the eyes of the malingerers amongst the Pakistan-baiters, he hasn’t completely transferred power to the democrats and fails to qualify at the club’s bar. In so caviling, they join the ranks of the opposition in the Pakistani Parliament who have been demanding, eversince the National Assembly came into being, that the General should choose only one of the two hats for his head. The General, however, is adament that he’s capable to wear two hats at the same time and ride two horses, simultaneously.

Interestingly, the ‘white’ Commonwealth is on the side of General Musharraf in this chess game because he’s precious to them as a frontline warrior in the war on terrorism and his good will ought to be retained. But they failed, at Abuja, to swing the vote in Musharraf’s favour, whilst they held their ground against Mugabe.

Obviously, the charge against Pakistan was led by India, with the help of a number of inconsequential countries of Africa and the Caribbean. Indian doesn’t want to relent on this front despite recent overtures and moves from both Delhi and Islamabad to defuse the tension between them by focusing intently on confidence-building measures.

Keeping Pakistan out in the cold serves India hardly any purpose except showing its petty mindedness and a churlish proclivity for trivia. India might only get a vicarious pleasure out of grinding and lambasting Pakistan, behind its back, at the Commonwealth fora. But that’s too petulant a pleasure for, avowedly, the world’s largest democracy.

Should Pakistan borrow a leaf from Zimbabwe’s book and dump the Commonwealth like Mugabe did?

For the moment it’s a moot question because the Foreign Office spokesman in Islamabad, reacting to the unsavoury development, ruled it out of hand. But it remains an option, nevertheless.

Pakistan had walked out of the Commonwealth in 1972 when Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto did that in a huff to show his anger on the club members recognising the newly liberated Bangladesh. That was, undoubtedly, a rash and ill-calculated move. It was also patently absurd of Bhutto to take umbrage at member states’ sovereign right to recognise a new sovereign reality. Ironically, it was Zulfi’s daughter, Benazir, who took Pakistan back into the Commonwealth in 1989.

The question is: is it worth it for Pakistan to lump this humiliation and keep hoping that sooner or later it will be re-admitted into the portals of the sanctified ‘club’? The Commonwealth, obviously, has linked Pakistan’s readmission to General Musharraf’s demotion in power, just as U.S. had linked the lifting of the blighted Iraqi sanctions to Saddam Hussain’s fall—and did actually take that stand to its logical conclusion.

The question that General Musharraf and his minions ought to be addressing is: what, exactly, is the value of Commonwealth membership? What benefits, if any, do really accrue from the ‘club’?

There was a time, until the early 70s, when the club membership helped the Pakistanis to enter its ‘white’ areas without visas. That’s no longer the case. The white Commonwealth now treats the citizens of Pakistan like pariahs. The preferential trade and other benefits, mostly in the cultural and educational fields, have also withered on the vines long time ago. There are all kinds of visible and not-so-visible barriers and dis-incentives within the Commonwealth fold. So why should Pakistan still tilt at the windmills to make the hearts melt in the club in its favour?

The only convincing case for Pakistan still being part of the Commonwealth can be made in the context of—who else?—its arch-rival India. Leaving the Commonwealth arena all to India by walking out from it would be a big blunder. Why give India a walk-over? That seems to be the lodestar guiding Islamabad’s decision makers on the issue.