Strange logic of the liberated classes

Islamabad diary

Why is Mustafa Kamal speaking up now, his conversion happening only now? So ask enlightened souls. The short answer is that circumstances have changed. In the old circumstances if Mustafa Kamal had spoken his mind, his neck would have been on the line. Now he feels no such inhibition.

Why go so far as Mustafa Kamal? Take our own case, that of the fearless lions of the media. Time was when the bravest of these lions dared say not a word about the MQM. Wali Khan Babar could be shot but a direct reference to the MQM could not be made, for fear of the MQM and its unique brand of terror. Now every newsman, in print and TV, is chirping about the MQM as if that old fear never existed.

The analogy is not perfect but something similar happened in Gen Musharraf’s time. When he seized power, and for his first two or three years, many newspersons who later on became fearless champions of democracy danced to his tune and were counted among his favourites. When the general’s rule lengthened and his grip on power became shaky – especially after the lawyers’ movement – it became the fashion to denounce him.

Even then those who spoke against Musharraf never committed the foolishness of criticising the MQM.

Talking of different tunes and changed circumstances, don’t we remember the tears Interior Minister Nisar Ali Khan shed at the death through a drone strike of the TTP leader, Hakeemullah Mehsud? Others spoke out too but he was mourner-in-chief, lamenting that the peace process had been sabotaged. Listening to him now one gets the impression he started Operation Zarb-e-Azb. Badalta hai rung aasman kese kese…thus changeth the colours of the sky.

And he says, in a scornful tone, that Mustafa Kamal should furnish proof of his allegations against MQM leader Altaf Hussain. When the journalist Declan Walsh wrote his story in the New York Times about the fake degree awarding factory that was the Axact network, the interior minister did not ask Walsh for proof. He ordered an immediate investigation by the Federal Investigation Agency.

Now he wants Mustafa Kamal to furnish proof. There is no condoning the business of fake degrees carried out an on industrial scale. Still, it’s worth asking, what is worse: distributing fake degrees or being in bed with RAW and receiving regular payments from it?

Without proof, says the redoubtable interior minister, Mustafa Kamal’s allegations are nothing but lafaazi – verbosity. This coming from the greatest living monument to verbosity in Pakistani politics is rich. His shortest press conference lasts for not less than two hours. His gift for endless repetition is fascinating. And he accuses Mustafa Kamal of verbosity.

There is a treason case against Gen Musharraf for imposing a short-lived emergency in 2007, lifted after 45 days and followed soon thereafter by the holding of general elections – elections which paved the way for the restoration of democracy and Musharraf’s own exit from the corridors of power. This was the extent of that treason. From London to Karachi any number of revelations attests to Altaf Hussain receiving money from RAW. But in the interior ministry’s reading of events this does not amount to a ready case for the initiation of treason proceedings.

Imagine if similar allegations had been made about the PPP. It would then have been a sight watching the froth on the interior minister’s lips.

Champions of democracy, hands on bleeding hearts, chafe at praise for the army in its war on terrorism…on the grounds that the army created these problems in the first place. True, the army has a ‘jihadi’ past and from Gen Zia to Gen Beg it scattered the dragon’s teeth we now rue and condemn. But if the army, cognizant of new realities, has turned its back on that past and is now headed in different directions, what higher wisdom is served by rejecting this transformation and harking back to the past?

Let’s not forget that when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was swept from power in the summer of 1977 the whole country lurched to the right. The cry of Islam was already in the air as a result of the movement against him. When in 1978 Afghan communists seized power in Kabul, and a year later the Soviets came rushing into Afghanistan to save their beleaguered Afghan allies, the stage was set for lighting the fires of ‘jihad’.

Gen Zia rejoiced at that outcome. From international pariah he stood transformed in an instant into a frontline ally to be courted and cosseted. The world beat a path to his door: Americans, the West in general, Saudis, Egyptians, Chinese…you name them. The first Afghan ‘jihad’ was not a passing flavour. It left a deep impact on those times. Islamist warriors poured in from the four corners of the Muslim world to partake in that holy venture. The ‘jihadis’ of today are their offspring.

For Pakistan to have looked around and counted the costs of what it was doing would have required a high order of statesmanship. Zia for all his cleverness – and he was no fool – was no Ataturk or de Gaulle. He was happy to go along with the swelling tide and to bask in the glow of Western approval (much the same as Musharraf was to do in the aftermath of 9/11). 

That was then. Today is different, the ‘jihadi’ past over and done with. Reform and change merit redemption and the army through the blood of its martyrs is writing a new saga, even if the enlightened liberati, stuck in the old democratic discourse when anything connected with the army was axiomatically offensive, are finding it difficult to stomach, much less acknowledge, this turnaround…because it goes against their cherished ways of thought.

Bhutto once sat in Ayub Khan’s cabinet. But the Bhutto residing in our imagination is not the Ayub Khan minister but the fiery tribune of the people. Nawaz Sharif was once coached by military tutors. But he has outgrown them and is his own man – even if he has to look over his shoulder half the time because of the army’s dominance in most matters of policy.

One thing, I think, we have to keep in mind. The modernisation of Pakistan which some of us in our more charged or lucid moments desire is impossible without a change in the outlook of the Pakistani military. To a large extent it is the army, and its various adventures, which have made Pakistan what it is today. For Pakistan to change, for the frontiers of bigotry and ignorance to recede and disappear, the army has to be in the forefront of this change.

Who gave oxygen to the mullahs and other firebrands? The ultimate guardians of ideology. Who sustained the fires of ‘jihad’? The same knights in shining armour. But all this is changing, even if not fast enough for some of us. The Cultural Revolution tore China apart. But the Chinese when the time came buried that legacy. We are burying our ‘jihadi’ legacy. Shouldn’t we take that as a happy sign?

Email: bhagwal63@gmail.com