The ANP Challenge

What if instead of a PPP prime minister or PML-N prime minister, ANP’s Asfandyar Wali Khan was to become the Prime Minister of Pakistan? Could this be a viable option?

The high politics of coalition making and breaking have already begun in the capital. Besides the many considerations of judiciary and democracy, the mainstream Pakistani parties which have won- PPP and PML-N- must take stock of the new situation emerging out of the NWFP with ANP's massive victory there. Informed cynics have begun to question the victory of ANP as part of a grand strategy to bolster up Hamid Karzai and the NATO forces against the rising tide of militancy, the underlying implication being that the elections were indeed rigged in a new and unique manner this time around. ANP and secular Pushtun nationalism has long been viewed as the one party that might be able to successfully challenge the talibanization in the region.

What is forgotten however is that today these two forces or ideas may be loggerheads, but in the past forces of Pushtun nationalism and the left forces have been willingly coopted by the Islamist forces and vice versa. The story of Pushtun left’s romance with the right wing Islamists is a long one, spanning back to the 1920s. There was a time when Mufti Mahmood, the stalwart of the Deobandi Islamist movement, the precursor of Talibanism of today, could preside over the left-oriented National Students Federation.

So make no mistake about it: The portrayal of ANP's victory NWFP as a victory for secularism and democracy in that province is perhaps too optimistic an analysis given the history. While many Pakistanis, including this author, rooted for the ANP's victory as a less bitter pill or simply the means of getting the Islamist MMA out of power in the frontier, to suggest that ANP has historically been consistently secular or democratic is not only naive but almost criminal when it comes to history. There is no question that Asfandyar Wali Khan today speaks in favor of the war on terror, but it was his illustrious grandfather, Bacha Khan also known as the Frontier Gandhi, who colluded with Fakir of Ipi in Waziristan in 1947 to bring down the "irreligious" Pakistan government. Their allegation was that the founders of Pakistan are too irreligious and secular to allow Islam to take root in Pakistan. Instead of getting into a protracted war with the Fakir, the Pakistan government carried out the Operation Curzon and very wisely withdrew Pakistani forces, thereby taking the wind out of those machinations.

A decade later, Bacha Khan's brother, Abdul Jabbar Khan, became the staunchest ally of the military establishment as a member of the newly formed and Army-backed "Pakistan Republican Party"- Pakistan's first true King's Party, the sole purpose of which was to bury the Muslim League parliamentary party. During Bhutto's PPP government of the 1970s , the Khan family formed both a government in the NWFP and an electoral alliance with JUI’s Mufti Mahmood. They were part of the Nizam-e-Mustafa movement which sought to establish retrogressive theocratic rule in Pakistan in 1977. Bacha Khan's son, Wali Khan, found a willing ally in the form of General Zia who freed him from sedition charges and later decorated Ghani Khan, Bacha Khan's eldest son, with the highest state honor which the latter graciously accepted. It was during Zia's regime, that the supposedly secular and leftist ANP was allowed to emerge from the ashes of the NAP. During the 1990s, they chose to form governments with Islamists and with Nawaz Sharif's conservative right wing party than ally themselves with centre-left Pakistan People's Party. This is not to say that they never acted principally. Wali Khan's unqualified support to Fatima Jinnah during her candidature in 1965 had indicated that he was ready to work with the rest of the Pakistanis, including Jinnah's own sister for the creation of a truly democratic and constitutional order in Pakistan. However such instances are few and far between in their politics since 1947.

Still to Asfandyar's credit, it must be said that he is not his father or his grandfather. Indeed ANP under him is perhaps far more consistently secular than before. Those of us not swayed by his appeals to Pushtun Nationalism consider ANP's victory an important step in the direction of a secular, democratic and federal Pakistan, as many- including Asfandyar's father Wali Khan- claim Jinnah wanted it to be. The point is whether the Pakistani nationalists will create an opportunity to bring in all sub-nationalisms into the greater fold of national unity? And more importantly, will Asfandyar Wali Khan realize that the vote that he got has little to do with Pushtun nationalism and more with his constructive social agenda which promises clean water and health care.
With this in the backdrop and if for nothing else, then to negotiate with and reconcile Pushtun nationalism with an over all secular Pakistani identity, Asfandyar may yet be the most viable solution for a coalition that increasingly promises to be bogged down in infighting. Having the PM from a minority party may yet be the best response to the establishment grand-plan of letting the new government wreck itself against the icebergs of energy and food crises. Asfandyar as the head of a 10-member ANP parliamentary party may yet be the consensus candidate of a new coalition. Tomorrow when these crises fall on the government like a ton of bricks, he can always cite his inability as a PM from the minority party, while both PPP and PML-N would successfully evade the blame for these events which they have nothing to do with in any event.