The rumour mills of Islamabad grind on. Their latest product is ‘the national government’; the most refined version comes complete with a ‘consensus’ Prime Minister, Miraj Khalid, and 30 dispirited PPP MNAs. It has been well marketed and enjoys wide exposure in the press. It even comes with a catch phrase that slides easily off the tongue: ‘recognising the split mandate.’
In a country racked by division, this is a beguiling promise. Relations between the PPP and almost all other political parties are bad; so bad that Sindh often looks to be on the verge of civil war, while the actions of the Punjab sometimes make one worry that it would declare UDI if it wasn’t so hungry for the rest of the country, an appetite the Indians now threaten to share. The bickerings in Islamabad are clearly an inappropriate response to the dangers facing us today.
Yet the bickering continues interminably. So no wonder the idea of a national government now seems to be gaining some purchase. It seems to offer unity where there is dissension and stability where there is chaos.
This is an illusion. Look first to its claim to ‘recognise the split mandate’. This catch phrase, like all other advertising tags, is a piece of sophistry; try to pin down its meaning, and it dissolves leaving only a sweet taste. Some have claimed that it signifies the inability of the PPP or the IJI to speak for all of the people. But this is a preposterous criterion. Another formulation derives the ‘split mandate’ from the fact that the electorate has given the PPP a mandate to rule in the centre and the IJI a mandate in the Punjab. But these are two separate mandates; to argue that it is one split mandate is to argue that the Punjab government is a second national government. It isn’t, although old imperial habits are difficult to lose. There is only one mandate that the federal government requires: a majority in the National Assembly, a majority that the PPP displayed throughout the budget session.
So the PPP has the mandate it requires, but this fact won’t stop the destructive intriguing. Could a national government bring some semblance of order to our fractious polity? To try and answer this question, one must try and imagine how such a government could be brought to power. This could happen in two ways. Either enough MNAs gather in the waste ground between the PPP and the IJI to force a power sharing agreement, or else one is enforced by the army or the President. Politics being the art of the possible, we can discount a reconciliation between Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif. One of them, perhaps both, would have to go.
An enforced power sharing agreement would lead us back to the Junejo days. One brought about by the action of concerned MNAs would be democratic, but would it bring about the elusive stability that this country so desperately needs? Sadly, it would only add to the confusion. The country would no longer have two competing focuses of political power, but three. And the third would rapidly lose its raison d’etre in the ensuing scramble for control.
In this flight of fantasy, one crucial actor has been ignored: Benazir Bhutto. It has been assumed that she would be content to allow these threats to mature. This is to misread her character. She is still a politician in the populist mould. A serious threat to her power would be countered by the dissolution of the assemblies and elections: a return to the people.
So if we are not to look to a national government to bring a desperately needed reduction in political tension, where are we to look? First, a long and angry stare at the federal government. It has managed, through its insensitivity and inflexibility, to estrange all other parties. Most seriously, it has so alienated the MQM that urban Sindh has come to doubt whether it has any future in the present political set-up. Confidence building measures are urgently needed. Second, the opposition must accept that the PPP does have the full mandate of the people. Talk of a split mandate is just trouble-making.