When will Pakistan’s Aam Aadmi moment come?

Islamabad diary
The Aam Aadmi Party has caused an upset in New Delhi but, unless I am grossly mistaken, the tremors of that upheaval have been felt not just across India but on this side of the border as well. It is a cautionary tale of arrogance and hubris meeting their just reward and it has lessons – profound lessons – for us in this country.
The problem with Pakistani politics is that they have been ossified for too long. The PPP was founded in 1967 and came to power for the first time in 1971-72. That’s a generation away when many of today’s voters would not even have been born. Under Benazir Bhutto’s leadership the party made it back to power in 1988 – again a long time back. And now it’s a whole new different world.
The PML, before it added N to its name, was Gen Zia’s baby, given vitamin and fertiliser shots so that it could stand up to the PPP and serve as a king’s party, or more accurately a generals’ party (for generals were in command it was their politics that the PML was supposed to play). Nawaz Sharif began his political career as a protégé first of Punjab governor Lt Gen Jillani and later Gen Zia. After he was helped to win or rather sweep the 1990 elections, he sprouted his own wings and declared independence from President Ghulam Ishaq Khan. That’s when from a military-sponsored figure he became a popular leader in his own right.
Again we are talking of a long time ago. Nawaz Sharif became prime minister for the second time in 1997, his term cut short by Musharraf’s coup. He is now prime minister for the third time and, to no one’s surprise, we are seeing the same old faces – the same key players, the same ministers, almost the same kitchen cabinet except for the inclusion of new family members – trying to fix today’s problems. Because of the dynastic nature of Pakistani politics – political succession grounded on monarchic principles – we see the next generation of sons, nephews and daughters being groomed for political leadership.
But the thing to consider is that even if the old political parties – PPP and PML-N – are caught in a time warp and refusing to move out of it, the political landscape is not standing still…it is shifting. Gen Zia could not destroy the PPP. That task was accomplished by Asif Ali Zardari and the party’s five years in power. From Punjab the party has been virtually wiped out and there’s no trick in the book, perhaps not even a miracle, that can bring about its revival there. The party’s flag flies in Sindh but even there it is under pressure from new realities.
The same process of attrition is now happening with the PML-N. Gen Musharraf tried his best to finish Nawaz Sharif’s party but far from succeeding he invested it with a halo of martyrdom. Furthermore, the PPP’s corruption and blundering made the PML-N look like a party of super-performers. This double image ensured its victory in the last elections, whatever Imran Khan might say about the elections being stolen.
But now with the party yet to complete two years in power, the optical illusion lies shattered, reality stealing a march over the illusion. With performance far below revved-up expectations, the PML-N is being seen in a harsher light, coming under spreading criticism for being a dynasty looking out for itself but with no answers to Pakistan’s current problems. The slogan of change is thus finding greater resonance.
So to think that the past can be sustained, the same tricks can be tried over and over again, and the political status quo maintained along the lines of the last 30 years, amounts to living in a dream-world. Five years of Zardari made it impossible for the PPP to retain its political relevance. The same logic holds true for the PML-N. The more its inadequacies are exposed, the bigger the question marks over its future.
Whatever motivated or whoever was behind the sit-ins and ‘long marches’ of Imran Khan’s PTI and Tahirul Qadri’s TUQ – and for a moment let’s believe the worst about them that secret hands were pulling their threads or encouraging them from the shadows – the response they evoked, the mass crowds Imran Khan’s rallies pulled, and the fervour and mood of those rallies, all showed that unbeknown to professional pollsters, somewhere beyond the usual rut of political discourse something was boiling beneath the surface.
And this feeling, almost tangible, was not confined to one class or to a single segment of the population. It touched all classes, high and low, as much the burger class as the down and out. You had to be at the rallies to really see this for yourself. And this emotion of wanting to change things, even if it wasn’t expressed in a well turned out philosophy, touched with unprecedented force the female half of Pakistan’s population. For Pakistan’s womenfolk at least liberation seemed to have arrived.
Who says the dharnas were a failure? Waters that rise above their banks and then after their fury is spent recede back into their old channels leave something – rich sediment – behind. The earth over which the waters have flowed is fertilised and freshened; autumn’s falling leaves quicken the dead earth. This last is from Shelley, so let me quote the actual lines: “Drive my dead thoughts over the universe…Like wither’d leaves to quicken a new birth…” When hope seems far away and everything around looks bleak, there’s nothing like the Ode to the West Wind – especially the last few lines which sound like a symphony racing to its climax – to raise the dead from their sleep.
If Pakistan was a placid and settled country like Switzerland (no material comparisons, please) there would be chocolate to eat and clocks to wind and periodic elections to allow for one government to succeed another. But Pakistan is a turbulent country, restless and not at ease. Various forces, not a few of them destructive, are at work, some on a collision course with each other. This is a land which has yet to discover its equilibrium. Does it not need better pilots on decks, better players at the helm?
Was this our tryst with heaven that we would have to endure the rule of incompetent, mediocre and corrupt rulers? Was it our fate that power would be handed from father to son, uncle to nephew….that first the fathers would enrich themselves at the nation’s expense and as if that wasn’t enough from where they left off the sons and nephews would take over?
We have seen what’s happened to the Congress party in India. We have seen what has happened to the PPP here. Of the march of events the latest lesson has come from New Delhi. Can Pakistani politics be confined in a bottle or put in a straitjacket with the hope that this is the natural order of things which nothing can change?
Because this is a waiting period, almost the winter of our discontent, it is playing on the nation’s nerves. But we have to bide our time and wait for the right moment. If the hour of the common man can come in New Delhi, are we that unfortunate that it will never come here?
Email: bhagwal63@gmail.com