Present split authority best for Pakistan

Islamabad diary
This is not a land of heroes, messiahs, riders on horseback or tinpot Kemalists. The climate is not suitable for this. Nor does history lend any support for the birth or rise of any kind of superman. In 2000 years of history the best that Punjab could show – and like it or not Punjab is more than half the country – was Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the upper limit of the political genius to arise in these parts.
When we go on and on about the country’s inadequacies and its many failures we shouldn’t lose sight of this historical perspective. From where do we expect leadership to emerge? Punjab has produced poets, saints, mystics and romancers. But rulers of calibre – that’s a different story. So let us not break our hearts over our problems.
Pakistan has no vistas of past glory to emulate or revisit. Its problem is to go beyond its history, to go beyond Ranjit Singh and the Sikh Durbar and the Khalsa army. If we have to step out of Punjab, then Pakistan has to do better than the weak-kneed Talpur rulers of Sindh, or the Baloch chieftains who for all their fierceness and their long matchlocks succumbed without too much difficulty to British rule.
Let’s not forget another thing. We did not sail the seven seas, or cross the oceans, to discover this country. Events leading to the partition of Hindustan and the birth of Pakistan were a haphazard affair, the Muslim League not fully prepared for the June 3 independence plan when first unfurled by Mountbatten. From June to August 1947 the Muslim League leadership was swept along by events as they swiftly unfolded. It had not anticipated the horrors that awaited the division of Punjab. It had no policy regarding the princely state of Kashmir.
Zionists over the years had dreamt of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. We had few compelling dreamers. How many books are there envisioning the outlines of a Muslim state in Hindustan? To my knowledge, none. Iqbal was half a dreamer, talking vaguely of a Muslim renaissance and revival but in the entire expanse of his poetry providing no firm postulates of a future state. Much lower down in the hierarchy of thought there was Chaudry Rehmat Ali, who coined the name Pakistan. A library of thought preceded the Bolshevik Revolution, to give but one example. The library of thought preceding the birth of Pakistan is rather bare.
So when we look at the present and bemoan its failures, we mustn’t forget the past…the soil and the background from which sprang the experiment of Pakistan. Given the bareness of that soil, the fruits of this gulistan are not all that poor. The garden could have been richer, with flowing streams and honey-laden bowers. No doubt about this. Splendid opportunities were squandered, weeds allowed to grow and paths taken that led to ruin. But the garden survives and there is no reason why birdsong should not fill its haunts and avenues again.
That there is no single locus of authority – the army doing things in its domain, politicians tending their space, the judiciary pointing the way where necessary and applying the brakes where needed, and the media, with all its strength and weaknesses, adding its bit to the disorder and cacophony that make up Pakistan today – is a good thing. This is the system that suits us, which is in accord with our slightly anarchic temperament. We have arrived at it haphazardly, through trial and error.
Dictators don’t suit us. We have tried on their clothing more than once and found it wanting. Heavy and one-sided democratic mandates suit us neither. Someone receives such a mandate and soon forgets the limits of the possible, often the limits of good sense, thus creating needless problems all around. In the past the judiciary played second fiddle to dictators but after its baptism of fire under Musharraf it is now assuming a role of great responsibility. Indeed the new Pakistan that is slowly beginning to take shape amidst all its present confusion and disorder would be incomplete without this growing contribution of the higher judiciary…although God knows there is still much for it to do.
The media was a tame instrument for much of Pakistan’s history. Not the least of Pakistan’s ironies is that it began discovering its true voice under the aegis of a dictatorship…Musharraf’s. Not that there would be too many knights of the journalistic firmament ready to acknowledge this reality. Myths are an essential part of human existence, even our most cherished belief systems for the most part based on myths. One of the enduring myths cultivated by the journalistic community in Pakistan is that it secured what freedom it has through the path of struggle.
Be that as it may, in the first flush of excitement induced by the proliferation of private TV channels, the media lost its head and its sense of balance. Now under the pressure of circumstances it is finding a new equilibrium.
Let us consider some of the benefits of this diffusion of authority. Left to themselves the political governments would not have moved towards local elections. It is the Supreme Court which through sustained prodding and the threat of more serious action has moved them in that direction. The Cantonment Board elections, the local elections in KP and before this in Balochistan, we owe to the Supreme Court (if memory serves, Justice Jawad S Khawaja was most unsparing and firm in this regard).
The CB elections were being held on a non-party basis, funnily enough the non-party device beloved equally of military dictators and democratic champions. But the matter coming up before the Lahore High Court, Justice Mansoor Ali Shah (to give credit where it is due) ordered that non-party local elections stood in conflict with the constitution. So parties under their flags and labels participated in those elections and, lo and behold, the heavens did not fall.
The higher judiciary is acting firmly and wisely in another direction too. But for the intervention of the Lahore High Court in such matters as the Jail Road signal-free corridor and the nightmare of a flyover connecting Gulberg with the Motorway – an eyesore from which Mughal and British Lahore would never recover – the Punjab government would have stood unrestrained in its blind pursuit of covering Lahore in layer after layer of unwanted concrete. From the timeserving timidity of the judiciary in times past to the hyper-activism of the Supreme Court under Milord Iftikhar Chaudry, the judiciary – much like the media in its way – is also discovering a new equilibrium.
The army too, lest we forget, has come a long way. It was the same army but how different it looked under Musharraf, and not vastly different under Kayani. The army and nation did not march to the same step, or the same tune. Today because it has dared to venture where angels feared to tread the army is closer to the public mood (except, we should note, in Balochistan where there beats an altogether different tattoo).
If there was one virus afflicting the Pakistani gulistan it was the fever of ‘jihad’ which an earlier generation of generals picked up from the chaos of Afghanistan and not only brought into Pakistan but raised monuments to it and hailed it as the new revelation. Now a new generation of generals is trying to reverse the dreaded march of this self-induced disease. The extent to which they succeed will define Pakistan’s future.
But let us not ignore the larger picture. So much of the Islamic world is in flames. Our garden is damaged, much of this damage self-inflicted. But we have been spared the ravages of Syria, Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan. And we have started moving in the right direction. Is this not a strong enough foundation on which to make a fresh beginning?
Email: bhagwal63@gmail.com