By all accounts, the March 30 rally of the Pakistan Awami Ittehad (PAI) at Gujranwala was a success. The PPP, PML (Chatha) and Allama Tahir-ul-Qadri’s Awami Tehrik were the organisers while Gen (retd) Aslam Beg’s Qiadat Party and an Ahl-e-Hadith splinter rode in on their coattails. The speakers vented their spleen against the government of prime minister Nawaz Sharif to wild applause.
Politicians who are personally offended and have their own axes to grind, tried to make the occasion look at the discussion of national issues. They trashed their election manifestos of not long ago and trimmed their sails to the blowing winds of public unrest.
Ms Bhutto condemned privatisation for which she used to take credit and succeeded in sounding like the leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami, whose own rhetoric is in the ascendant these days. Tahir-ul-Qadri dumped his considered clerical position for pragmatism that would change his highly organised, well-funded Barelvi outfit into a credible opponent of Mr Sharif. Abandoning the party line has brought these two the support of 13 rag-tag organisations, willing now to ride the PAI bandwagon.
As the show got going, the crass opportunism of the marriages of convenience that is the PAI became ever more obvious. Ms Bhutto played the Punjabi card instead of her Sindhi one. Qadri, who in 1996 had addressed a 14th August rally at Lahore’s Minar-e-Pakistan by telephone from Cannes in France, promising to overthrow Ms Bhutto’s “corrupt and inept” government, now proclaimed that she was the “electron” to his “proton” and said that together they would electrify the political scene.
While she was in office, Benazir Bhutto claimed that she was the torchbearer of enlightened Islam. She would do well to consider the kind of Islam Tahir-ul-Qadri represents and his rise to fame and fortune. She should remember that he was the Allama-in-residence of the Ittefaq Mosque in Lahore’s Model Town where he was gifted big chunks of public land and arms licenses galore by the Punjab’s generous chief minister, Nawaz Sharif, Qadri was dumped by the Sharifs when he outgrew their patronage. By then, his Minhaj-ul-Quran movement had won scores of adherents and foreign funding and had set up a parallel education system with a dedicated hierarchy of workers in central Punjab. The Sharif-Qadri bitterness ended up in court with the Allama accusing the Sharifs of mounting an attack on his house and the Sharif’s lawyers hitting back with an old case dating from Qadri’s early days in Jhang when he was accused of molesting a boy.
Add to this burlesque the comical figure of Gen (retd) Aslam Beg, with his still-born doctrine of strategic defiance and his murky past, a man who Benazir Bhutto repeatedly accused of engineering her ouster in 1990, and you couldn’t get stranger bed-fellows.
The fervour of the PAI’s bemused audience of frustrated citizens notwithstanding, the PAI as an event demands some reflection on the nature of politics and society in Pakistan today. What kind of society are we in which a nearly certified criminal like Benazir Bhutto can try to make a political comeback? What does it say about the dissatisfaction that Nawaz Sharif has unleashed within a year of his return to power?
The opposition’s success in staging successful anti-Sharif rallies in the Punjab has ominous undertones. Mr Sharif’s rise to power was based on an almost total Punjabi support amongst the few who voted in the 1997 elections. The PPP was all but wiped out in the only province that matters. Ms Bhutto was not expected to change the Punjabi mood barely a year after the Sharifs’ triumphant return to power. But that is what is beginning to happen.
For over a year, the prime minister and his vision-less coterie of hangers-on have elected to travel down a road that has pitched them against popular opinion. They have mauled the judiciary and humiliated it by getting their way. Far from delivering the people from crime, their controversial special courts are helpless in the face of swelling sectarian and ethnic violence. Accountability is being used only to wreak vengeance on the PPP. The government’s failure to collect taxes and proceed against loan defaulters has meant that the economy hasn’t got the injections it so desperately needed. The high-visibility Motorway project never held any appeal for the other provinces and now the Punjabi masses too look upon it as Mr Sharif’s dubious self-identification with Mughal kings. Besieged by these challenges, the Sharifs are thinking of upstaging their opponents through the hypocrisy of more religious laws.
Like their PAI opponents, the Sharifs are only doing what they can do. What they cannot do is envision ideas to resolve the multiple crises facing Pakistan on its borders and within. What they cannot do is fashion an agenda for reform. So the hope lies not with such politicians but with those who lend them their ear, the frustrated mass of Pakistanis that is still trying to resist disillusion.