In any contest for the most equivocal personality in the province of Sindh, Mr. Jam Sadiq Ali, the Chief Minister, would surely win hands down. Behind the dark glasses, limp handshake and obsequious shuffle lurks a wily feudal with a sinister political disposition. No wonder, in a province where the authority of the state has to be continuously and violently revalidated, Jam Sahib is the sharpshooting maverick most Sindhis love to hate.
In his rush to quench a voracious thirst for authority, the Jam has broken every sterling rule in the book, and some more. As a caretaker CM, he was peerless at flouting the law. More opponents were locked up in Sindh for minor indiscretions and more horses traded on the Jam’s estate than in the other three provinces put together. Rightly did the CM’s house become notorious as the Jam’s full-time office, residence, club, prison, what have you, all rolled into one.
Come election-time and the Jam couldn’t even be bothered with the form advised in the other provinces. Not for him the formality of registrations and ID cards, or even discriminate administrative arm-twisting. No sir. Where the Jam had a strong vested interest, it was the rough and tumble of booth capturing, kidnapping and ballot stuffing in broad daylight. If truth be told, Chicago in the 30s isn’t a patch on the Jam’s Sindh in the 90s.
Or take his devious efforts to patch together a coalition government and keep the PPP out. No problem, this, for our conniving stalwart. An appropriate number of opposing MPAs were rounded up to cool their heels at the CM’s house while a vote of confidence was whipped up in the provincial assembly. Likewise, during the Senate elections, he couldn’t have cared less about the conspicuous absence in the assembly on voting day of a number of PPP MPAs; the poor fellows’ protestations were heard loud and clear from the direction of the CM’s prison/house. No, you cannot get more brazen than that.
At a superficial level, of course, everything seems hunky dory: Altaf Bhai and Jam Sahib are born-again best friends; the PPP oppositionists are either in prison or in hiding; the local corps commander, notwithstanding his known distaste for the CM’s personality and methods, is pleased to be calling the shots; and there has been no recent outbreak of ethnic violence. But you cannot run a province like Sindh in such a cavalier fashion for any length of time. Repression and administrative dictate may relieve immediate pressures, but cannot substitute for clean, efficient and representative government.
The tensions inherent in the sort of forced, ad-hoc solutions engineered by Jam Sahib are bound to surface and snap in the near future. Take, for example, the matter of his differences with the stolid Sindh Governor, Mahmoud Haroon, who has expressed his grave displeasure at the way the chief minister is running his province. Here we have a situation in which the two top officers of the most volatile province in the country don’t see eye to eye on most matters. They have markedly contrasting personalities and political styles: one is a respected, long-standing pillar of the establishment, the other seems more like a hired gun doing a spot of dirty work. Can these two work together at the same purposes for any length of time? Who will be the first to go?
Or take the MQM’s relationship with Jam Sahib. Any number of agendas and agreements can be noted but implementation is quite another matter, as earlier chief ministers found to their great discomfort. The minute Jam Sahib is ordered by GHQ to clean up Sindh, especially Karachi and Hyderabad, he can say bye-bye to his buddy wuddy Altaf Bhai.
Jam Sahib should pause and take stock. People say that, like former party colleague Mustafa Khar in the Punjab, his utility exists only in direct proportion to the amount of dirty work that still remains to be done on the establishment’s behalf. In the meantime, the law and order situation has, if anything, deteriorated since the Jam took charge: Kalashnikovs are now being supplemented with rocket launchers and the kidnappers are doing roaring business. Watch it, Jam Sahib, in one’s old age one shouldn’t be hanging around fair-weather friends, especially in a province like Sindh.