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Friday March 29, 2024

Turning out to be a ship of fools

Islamabad diary
This would be a comedy if it wasn’t so grim at the same time. The great helmsmen

By Ayaz Amir
July 18, 2014
Islamabad diary
This would be a comedy if it wasn’t so grim at the same time. The great helmsmen are just not getting it and with every passing day things are slipping more out of their or indeed anyone’s control. In the last elections popular fury was vented at the PPP not because of Shahbaz Sharif’s good governance or the distribution of laptops, or the PPP’s tales of corruption, but because of one thing only: the demon of loadshedding.
People went mad and took out their anger on the thing nearest at hand: the sitting government. And the PML-N made heavy weather of this issue, Shahbaz Sharif installing himself in his tented camp in front of Minar-e-Pakistan and his ministers fanning themselves with pankhas. And the people of Punjab cursed Zardari and the PPP and convinced themselves that everything would be all right once the PML-N came to power.
Now it is in power and the demon of loadshedding is worse than ever…with one difference: you get the same amount of bijli at double the rate it then was. This must rank as the PML-N’s greatest achievement, all else being smoke and mirrors. Just remember their first priority: stuffing 500 billion rupees – roughly five billion dollars, comrades – into the pockets of the power producers’ mafia. They went laughing all the way to their tills. And circular debt is back and the government is out of pocket.
Nawai Waqt, rightly or wrongly, is a paper supposed to be close to Raiwind. Yet this is what it had to say two days ago: “Increase in power is a far-off thing, the distribution of what power was available has fallen a victim to government incompetence…(indeed) in the one year this government has been in power it has given the awam nothing but frustration and disappointment.” If I were to translate the entire editorial it would make a better column than what I am writing.
And who will shoulder responsibility for Nandipur? As if the tales of high corruption surrounding the revival of this power project were not enough, we now have a comedy on our hands. Amidst great fanfare the prime minister inaugurated the first turbine on May 31. Now it has been shut down because the plant, designed for furnace oil, was run on diesel. In any other country the government would become a laughingstock at this, the late-night comedy shows going wild. Here no one appears to be overly embarrassed.
As for trips to China and the signing of wholly unfathomable MOUs, the power mafia, with close links to this government, may know something of what’s in them but for the public it is mostly fantasy. Few people take all the high-flown stuff about coal-fired plants and solar plants seriously anymore. Can they be blamed when the water and power minister himself invokes the rain-gods and divine intervention to help ease the power crisis?
What the PML-N sarkar is not getting is that the season of gimmicks is over, time running out for the laptop and yellow taxi approach to governance. How many laptops would Shahbaz Sharif or the entire Sharif family have distributed? In India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, the sitting chief minister, Akhilesh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party, has doled out 15 lakh laptops. Lakhs more are rotting in godowns. But look at the result: in the recent national elections which swept Narendar Modi and the BJP to power, out of 80 Lok Sabha seats from Uttar Pradesh the Samajwadi Party won a grand total of five. In this year’s state budget no money has been set aside for laptops. Asked about this, Akhilesh said they would now be concentrating on e-books and e-learning. The PML-N too better now turn to e-learning.
Did not Yousuf Raza Gilani fill the Multan skyline with flyovers? Did not Pervaiz Ashraf spend government money lavishly in his Gujjar Khan constituency? (The two roads in Chakwal whose construction PM Nawaz Sharif inaugurated in Chakwal two days ago were projects initiated by Raja Pervaiz Ashraf.) Ch Pervaiz Elahi carried out huge development works not just in Lahore where the present focus seems to be but across Punjab. In the entire history of Pakistan local bodies never got so much money for development as during the Musharraf era.
But because the political tide had turned, the winds had turned hostile, the PPP was flattened out in the last elections just as the pro-Musharraf PML-Q was hammered in 2008.
If the Sharifs think laptops, flyovers and metro buses are going to save them they need to be read a lesson or two in history. Governance and control on loadshedding is what the people wanted. On both fronts the government has dismally failed. Lollipops cannot make up the difference.
Key ministers seem to be doing nothing except responding every day to either Imran Khan or Allama Tahirul Qadri. They can’t run their ministries but they seem to be very good at media point-scoring. We saw the mess being made in Model Town (in the inquiries afoot it is the lower ranks being made scapegoats for the doings of their superiors). The government’s capacity to handle a crisis was also on display on the occasion of Tahirul Qadri’s recent appearance in Pakistan. If Imran Khan is able to muster a large enough crowd on Aug 14 what will the government do then?
Into this disorder a bombshell has been thrown by ex-president Zardari, so far averse to making things difficult for the PML-N. He has come out in support of Imran Khan’s demand for a recounting of votes in four constituencies. For a government sure of itself such a move would hardly matter. For a beleaguered government it is another shot across the bows it could have done without.
This is not democracy collapsing…there should be no fear of that. It is democracy evolving. The young of today would have little reason to know that the army was once a sacred cow about whom no critical word could pass in print or in public. The Musharraf period made army criticism an everyday occurrence. Gen Zia tried crushing the PPP but the repression he unleashed did not work. It is the working of democracy which demystified the PPP and knocked it out of Punjab.
Musharraf’s coup gave the Sharif’s a new lease of life. Their 1997-99 tenure was a pretty hollow affair but the coup transformed them overnight from lacklustre rulers to democracy’s leading champions. This time they are on their own, the Hamid Guls not tutoring them, and their slips are showing.
Consider also another example: the MQM not long ago was virtually unassailable. Time and circumstance, or call it democratic evolution, have dimmed the lustre of its commanding presence in Karachi.
It is not that the present government is facing especially cruel circumstances. Its circumstances are not more cruel than those the PPP had to face. It is just that the party’s capacities, by coming under the light, are being revealed for what they are. However dark the horizon, however threatening the storm-clouds, its imagination remains limited. This is its predicament, challenge and response out of sync.
The operation against militants in Raiwind itself again shows what Pakistan’s real problems are: governance, administration and law and order. Gimmickry comes much afterwards.
Email: winlust@yahoo.com