The funereal mood in the Punjab betrays the sordid story more tellingly than all the convoluted intellectual post-mortems in the media. We were all ‘proven’ utterly wrong — journalists, pollsters, you and me, everyone.
Like blinkered fools, we heard them shout and dance, we saw them vote, but no, they were not for real.
We saw fake ID cards, we saw bogus registrations, we saw ballots without serial numbers, we saw the red cross brigade stamping ballots in the woman’s polling stations, we even saw Mian Sahib ejecting a polling officer from a women’s booth in Lahore. We heard the Chief Election Commissioner remark about the lower turnout in the Punjab. But alas, we must have allowed our fertile imaginations to distort the reality.
We know that signed result-sheets from Presiding Officers were denied to innumerable candidates on polling day. We know that the announcement of results was inexplicably delayed. We know that administration officials vetted the results before sending them to Islamabad. But apparently that ‘proves’ nothing. How many government servants will stand up to testify that they buckled under the weight of the state?
In our guts and in our bones, in the anguished cries of the vanquished, in the smirking faces of the victors, we sense a great betrayal. We feel we have been robbed of our citizenship. From somewhere out of the Heavens has come an invisible thunderbolt and laid us low.
What empirical proof do you require to reaffirm that foul was fair in all the fated days between August 6 and October 24? Must we litter the streets of Lahore with 200 dead bodies and thousands of angry young men screaming for martial law, as in 1977, before we can ‘prove’ that these elections were not lost fair and square? Indeed, what ‘proof’ of rigging did we ever demand from Mohatrama Fatima Jinnah when she was routed by the invisible forces of General Ayub Khan in 1965?
In the final analysis, it is self-serving to seek causes (voter swings, charges of corruption and treason, anti-Americanism) which are more complicated than the fact that both the government in power and the state apparatuses, including the President and the Armed Forces, had determined to keep Benazir Bhutto out. After all, a party which forgets the crucial distinction between office and power, between those who preside and those who rule, which lumps government and state together as one adversary, and transgresses the ‘rules of the game’ can hardly expect to be treated ‘fairly’.
No, we are not grieved that Benazir Bhutto has lost nor happy that Nawaz Sharif has won because, quite frankly, there wasn’t much to chose from.We are sad because so many of us have been effectively disenfranchised in this electoral farce and will surely distrust the electoral process for a long time to come. The loser isn’t the PPP, it is our right as citizens in a representative system. And the winner isn’t the IJI, it is the praetorian state. In that sense, the worst form of democracy may not, indeed, prove to be more beneficial than the best form of martial law.
Looking ahead, are we justified in fearing a further erosion of the democratic system? Benazir Bhutto is down but not out. While her tremendous support base is not exactly kicking, it is very much alive and no amount of victimisation or repression will undo it. Nor is there, unfortunately, any other leader anywhere on the horizon who can harness it for more constructive purposes. If Mian Nawaz Sharif choses the path of reckless authoritarianism, which his dubious two-thirds majority in the national assembly might propel him towards, he will simply hasten the day of national reckoning rather than advance the cause of stability and political maturity.
But, unlike Ms. Bhutto, Mian Sahib has a totally free hand to grapple with all the economic, sectarian and regional crises upon us. If he should devote his abundant energies to reconciliation and crisis-management rather than tinker with the constitution and try to suppress legitimate dissent, he could yet succeed in burying the national divide and convincing us that the foul could, indeed, turn out to be fair enough.