Our Tarzans and their comings and goings

Islamabad diary
So what exactly was anyone expecting? That these knights would suddenly turn into blazing Tarzans, leaping from tree to tree, performing feats of valour that would leave us awe-struck?
A steady chorus in the punditocracy is rising, bewailing the government’s endless sitting-and-standing (uthak-baithak) in the wake of the Peshawar carnage – hectic movement and zero performance. I can’t help laughing at this moaning. Mian Nawaz Sharif is not pulling the wool over our eyes. He is only being himself. If we choose to be deceived, disregarding the evidence of the past 30 years, is it his fault?
In her just-published memoirs – ‘Power Failure’ – Abida Hussain recounts the story of Nawaz Sharif visiting Jhang to address a meeting in the 1990 elections. Looking at the green fields he asked her why she wasn’t interested in setting up a sugar mill. According to her she mumbled something about conflict-of-interest, etc. At once he asked whether she would have any objection if he set up a sugar mill. Ramzan Sugar Mills eventually was the result of this brainwave.
I merely mention this to point out that in what concerns them, in matters dear to their hearts, the Mians need no lessons in decisiveness from anyone. In their own field they are as good as the very best. Industrial empires after all are not created just like that, and while everyone may dream of them, not everyone has the required drive and entrepreneurial ability. You also need a certain buccaneering spirit…for it is not given to everyone to take huge loans from a consortium of banks (four billion rupees in the 1990s) and then on various legal pretexts return not a penny of them even after 20 years.
But when it comes to affairs of state it is a different story. They have been lucky in politics, luckier than a whole line of failed heroes, and stalwarts who could not live up to their promise. Khuhros, Noons and Daultanas have come to grief in the quicksand of Pakistani politics. With far less going for them the Mians have prospered, riding to power and glory, Nawaz Sharif prime minister for the third time.
Governor Ghulam Jilani was their political godfather, Gen Zia their benefactor, the ISI the ideological and practical school in which they were tutored. But despite this vast experience, it needs no computer study to discover that while they can be very clever in some things their ability in others, especially when it comes to the higher direction of politics, is rather of the limited kind.
Setting up not one but a dozen Ramzan Sugar Mills is the work of their left hand. But providing the nation real leadership in this crunch is another thing. All these committees, these endless meetings, are not signs of over-cleverness. PM and inner core are not pulling a fast one on anyone. This is the outer horizon of their imagination, the best they can do, the limit of their understanding of politics.
So it is a waste of time and breath to say that they are running round in circles, a lot of whistling and hooting leading to nothing. To expect anything different would be unrealistic. More tragedies can happen but performance-wise this is all we will get…more whistling and hooting, more standing up and sitting down.
For most of 2014 the Mians were on the wrong side of the generals, their miscalculations and missteps creating a war situation between them and the ‘guardians’. But in the aftermath of Peshawar – tragedy for the nation, opportunity for some – they are being more patriotic and jingo-sounding than anyone else, leaving even the generals a bit dazed and out of breath.
But as the punditocracy, opening its eyes, is now beginning to see, all this sound and fury is just that…sound and fury. In Munir Niazi’s haunting words, “harkat tez tar hai aur safar ahista ahista”…while the to-and-fro is hectic the journey is slow slow.
Everything suggests that this disorder – or call it dysfunction – is our fate for the foreseeable future, soldiers and civilians out of sync, the military on their own, the political leadership blowing hot and cold but in any real sense unable to provide the direction and leadership Pakistan arguably needs at this juncture.
Generals not being saints, they are filling the void created by civilian dithering but they still have to work through the system. The generals want special courts and that’s why we are getting them. But parliament has to do the necessary legislation and because this entails more speeches and more arguments action gets delayed and the generals get a bit more frustrated.
But this is the choice we made. The Mians were not an unknown quantity, having been around for the last 30 years, dominating Punjab, the powerhouse of Pakistani politics, for what looks like forever. But Zardari’s chaotic and scandal-ridden stint in power made it almost inevitable that we got the Sharifs on the rebound. So here we are stuck with them.
Conventional wisdom has it that the dharnas have incapacitated the present setup. This is not a very convincing argument…suppose they hadn’t happened would we have seen Nawaz Sharif stepping out as a dynamo of a war leader? Men are what they are, and at 65 you certainly don’t undergo a metamorphosis (unless you are retiring to a shrine, or marrying someone a quarter of your age). If they have it in them and the time is right they can answer the call of history. But leaders are not to be made on order. They have it in them or they don’t.
The Mians were a product of a different era. You have to look at them to see this. (The Sharif progeny, their sense of entitlement and their long security details look out of place in today’s Pakistan.) Nawaz Sharif was picked up and propped up by the ‘establishment’ to oppose the PPP, the role for which he was fitted out by the Zia regime. The PPP is no longer what it was. The bitter polarisation that marked the Zia years is dead and gone. Pakistan has moved into a new era. Its problems are different. Just as the PPP’s slogans are dated and leave most people except diehard jiyalas unmoved, the N League’s slogans are born of a reality that has passed.
So we better make the best of what we have and just wait or pray for this central contradiction in Pakistan’s politics to be resolved. The PTI, we can almost be sure, will not remain fobbed off for long. With nothing coming out of the talks on alleged election rigging – and except for the overly optimistic few people expected anything from them – the siren song of agitation will soon pull Imran again. When that happens, the false unity we saw arising after the Peshawar tragedy will come under strain.
It’s just our luck that between them the political parties have reduced the whole problem of religious extremism to the single-item agenda of military or special courts. The need for a fast-track judicial process was just one part of a much broader canvas. But stuck on this point, all others have been pushed to one side, the government meanwhile happy to wallow in its oratory.
So it is a tough year we have ahead, cracks in our body-politic – principally that between government and army, both marching to different tunes – papered over for the time being as a result of Peshawar but very much there, and in danger of becoming wider if dithering and vacillation remain the hallmarks of government policy.
Email: bhagwal63@gmail.com