Petty squabbling

You can say a lot about Pakistani politics from the simple fact that a newcomer like Asif Ali Zardari successfully took hardened politicians and journalists for a ride for eight months now. Victims include Nawaz Sharif, an otherwise smart politician who managed to convince a military ruler to spare him the gallows, only to come back eight years later and exact revenge.

It is not as if we did not know. Our intelligentsia showed shocking gullibility in promoting the main faces in the present government as paragons of democracy. Our pundits even accepted an unusual "democratic" transfer of power from mother to son to husband without hardly any questions. Who is responsible for misleading the nation and not allowing Pakistanis to scrutinise their future leadership before voting it into power?

We were told that free and fair elections will end political instability in Pakistan. It didn't happen. We were told stability would return once the coalition government settles in. It didn't happen. We were told a stubborn and defeated president was hatching conspiracies. His removal will help stability. It didn't happen. Now we are told that giving old and new "PCO judges" their jobs back will change our destiny, and that electing a president, Mr Zardari or anyone else, will stabilise the system. You can bet your last penny that it won't happen.

In their idealism, the lawyers and their supporters will never understand that any help to this failed system is useless. The movement was made subservient to politicians. This honest struggle was first hijacked by the late Benazir Bhutto. Like any good politician, she used it to extract a better deal from a besieged Musharraf. Once in power, the PPP ditched the movement like an unwanted child.

Now Nawaz Sharif is the "good guy" of the month. But again our chattering classes are not giving us the full picture. Mr Sharif is playing politics too. He used the movement first to hunt down Musharraf. Now he is using it to weaken Zardari. His choice for his party's presidential candidate is a judge who was loyal to him during his own scuffle with the judiciary a decade ago. Amazingly, Mr Sharif could not trust anyone in his party for presidential candidacy and chose a retired judge and a retired bureaucrat – both not members of the party – as party nominees. No solace for party stalwart Javed Hashmi, whose bid for presidency who quietly vetoed by his boss. These are the ways of our feudal democracy. It is such a hopeless system that even a businessman like Mr Sharif ended up becoming another feudal lord.

While politicians squabble, our biggest stock exchange in Karachi, which was one of the most profitable in Asia for six years to 2007, nosedived to such an extent that regulators had to intervene and "freeze" it for the first time in sixty years, an unusual move reminiscent of Soviet-style management. This was the only way to stop sending the entire economy into a tailspin. The world is breathtakingly watching this drama unfold in Pakistan and can't believe that a nuclear-armed nation with talented people and great potential can be so misgoverned.

We have almost reached a stage where we are apparently unable to stop covert and overt foreign interference inside the country, where some misguided insurgent "leaders" from our country are willing to go on foreign payroll, where Pakistani flags flutter with unprecedented intensity in Indian-controlled Kashmir and we can't even give political support to people there, where our American ally is bringing an Iraq- and Afghanistan-like situation to our country, complete with domestic refugees, and we can't – or are unwilling – to say no.

This is the point where drastic change invites itself in domestic politics. Here, you can safely bet that if politicians don't clean up at least some of the mess, they will invite drastic change. After all, a nuclear-armed country cannot afford to be misgoverned. Or it cannot be a nuclear-armed country.



The writer works for Geo TV.

Email: aq@ahmedquraishi.com