Mehrangate: a reminder of lost times

Memory being a convenient tool, the past can be reinvented in the imagination. The more unpleasant aspects of it can be erased from the mind, buried under layers of amnesia. But the past, in actual fact, cannot be remade or reconstructed. This is its greatest tragedy.
The money which Gen Aslam Beg cajoled out of Younus Habib, the hard-done-by owner of Mehran Bank, to use for election and other spy purposes was of a piece with the times. The political scene was more controllable than it is today. There were no private TV channels to spread confusion and unrest across the land. And army chiefs and their instruments, such as the ISI, were more capable of manipulating things.
And, not to forget an important point, judges were more predictable and, from the point of view of General Headquarters – the fount of so much of our higher national wisdom – more amenable and less obstreperous than we find them to be nowadays.
And not to forget another important point, the ideological battle lines were more clearly drawn. Indeed, they were very starkly drawn – the PPP representing the forces of evil and the establishment, another name for General Headquarters and the ISI, representing the sum of national good. The agenda of the establishment was clear: create a counterweight to the PPP and ensure the PPP’s political isolation.
In pursuit of this agenda the controllers of the ISI – the supreme pontiff of this ideological body being our inevitable friend, Lt Gen Hamid Gul (let no one expect him to fade away quickly) – did two things: they helped create a right-wing alliance centred around the Muslim League and they propped up someone who was an up and coming Punjab politician, Mian Nawaz Sharif.
Nawaz Sharif had been spotted first as likely political talent by Zia’s Punjab governor, Lt Gen Ghulam Jilani. Then he came to Zia’s attention who liked what he saw. From this to the chief ministership of Punjab was a smooth journey.
Zia’s death orphaned the Muslim League. The future which had looked so secure suddenly looked shaky and uncertain. But into the ensuing breach, to shore up the crumbling walls of Zia’s ideological kingdom, stepped a powerful double combination: President Ghulam Ishaq, the ultimate bureaucrat catapulted into the presidency by Zia’s death; and Generalissimo Aslam Beg, who would never have become army chief if Zia’s C-130 had not disintegrated above the skies of Bahawalpur.
The first order of business was Zia’s burial in the forecourt of the Faisal Mosque – or, more accurately, the burial of his jaw-line because, as ugly rumour had it, that is all that survived the Bahawalpur crash. As a historical vignette, the two persons who were the masters of ceremony at the funeral – in other words, the two who just wouldn’t let go of the mike – were the TV newscaster Azhar Lodhi and our friend Husain Haqqani whose career as a Zia acolyte and a standard-bearer of the far-right was still going strong, his liberal reinvention a thing of the distant future. Then Ishaq and Beg moved to other pressing matters.
They could have imposed martial law and had they done so the Republic, ever ready to receive a kick on its behind, would have gone along. To their credit they chose the constitutional path – but not without a host of safeguards, the chief one being all-out support for the ISI’s dream-child, the Islami Jamhoori Ittehad (IJI) – Islamic Democratic Alliance – the biggest crimes in Pakistan’s history committed in the name of Islam or democracy, or the third ready justification, patriotism.
The nominal head of the IJI was Sindh politician Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi but its powerhouse lay in Punjab, and the head of the Punjab chapter was Nawaz Sharif.
Backing the IJI took on an added twist when Beg confidant Lt Gen Asad Durrani, head of the ISI, on orders from above as he has deposed in his written affidavit submitted years ago to the Supreme Court, arranged for suitcases of money to be delivered to a list of politicians, their names now in the public domain, belonging to the IJI. A few rightwing journalists were also on this list.
Shocking? Not exactly. This was a sign of the times, election skullduggery on the part of the ubiquitous agencies taken for granted by everyone you could lump in the drawing room classes: chatterati, politicos, journalists, watering-hole specialists, etc. Ishaq and Beg had dismissed Benazir Bhutto’s government towards the end of 1990 and in the elections that loomed on the horizon the supreme national purpose, as defined by the permanent guardians of the national interest, was to ensure Benazir Bhutto’s defeat...the more abject the better.
But the election results exceeded the expectations of the vote-counters. The PPP managed to hold its own in Sindh interior but in Punjab it was all but wiped out, securing, if imperfect memory serves, hardly ten seats. The vote-counters had overplayed their hand. They also faced another glitch. Their choice for prime minister was the genial and easygoing Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi. But so strong had been Nawaz Sharif’s showing in Punjab that his bid for the prime ministership became unstoppable.
I can’t resist interpolating that Ishaq and Beg’s choice for chief minister Sindh was the colourful Jam Sadiq Ali. He lacked a majority in the Sindh assembly but he overcame the problem in style. A clutch of PPP legislators was put in detention. The best liquor that money could buy, and the bootleggers of Karachi could supply, was at their disposal, as were the best dancing and singing girls of Karachi’s premier centre of culture, Napier Road, now sadly gone to seed and pot.
Even Asif Ali Zardari was Jam Sadiq Ali’s prisoner at one time and he too did not overly complain of the conditions of his incarceration.
As Falstaff could have said, the times that we have seen. Jam Sadiq’s home minister was Irfanullah Marwat, Ghulam Ishaq’s son-in-law, about whom it was said that he had a gushing sympathy for the working class, in his case PIA air hostesses. Whoever put potbellied male stewards on PIA flights? If that’s our idea of turning the national carrier around we have a long wait ahead.
But even if the 1990 elections were a triumph for the ISI – the gentle reader better not be confused between the ISI and the IJI – ultimately it was all effort and money wasted. For instead of being an easy under-study as Ishaq and Beg wanted, Nawaz Sharif started showing signs of independence, much to the dismay of his erstwhile patrons and promoters.
First, he and Ishaq clashed over the appointment of the new army chief after the sudden death of Gen Asif Nawaz Janjua. Then when pressure and interference from the presidency mounted, Sharif gave his famous “I will take no dictation” speech – which turned him instantly into a popular leader. Seen as a creature of the establishment before, which he was, now he came into his own. The PML-N’s emergence as a popular party dates from the rebellion against Ghulam Ishaq.
But we should not miss the central point that in the Turkish bath which is Pakistani politics, saints and divines are hard to find. Everyone has a past, including Imran Khan who was amongst the most vociferous and foolish supporters of Gen Musharraf’s referendum. If the IJI took money from the ISI in 1990, the PPP set new standards of performance in the fields of high finance and audacious entrepreneurship in the same eventful decade. Don’t we need to draw a line under the past and move ahead?
The future beckons. There is so much to do, adventures to attempt, peaks to conquer. If my hunch is right the Asghar Khan petition will lead to no convictions, not even to a truth commission. But it can put a lot of good people to the necessity of uttering out-and-out lies. Shouldn’t we spare them such an ordeal?

Email: winlust@yahoo.com