Rumours have made their way into the press that prime minister Nawaz Sharif is about to impose further theocratic disabilities on Pakistani society. In fact, one newspaper reported that he was about to announce his draconian laws under the false rubric of further Islamisation before he was dissuaded. It also disclosed that Mr Sharif has put off his grand ideological design for the time being and that he will look for a better opportunity to realise it. The speculation was that he was poised to abolish the banking system as we know it and introduce a “usury-free” system in its place. It was also feared that he was determined to impose the veil on all school-going girls in the country.
The prime minister’s Task Force on riba (usury) has turned in its report recommending that bank interest should now be abolished. So far the ulema have not come up with any economic alternative to the present banking system; they have also failed to convince economists that the doctrine against riba can be applied to savings deposit holders. General Zia tried to please the ulema by abolishing “interest” in 1980s but the banks adjusted to it by renaming interest as “mark-up”. The government hypocritically saved the banks from runs by guaranteeing a religiously permissible pre-announced mark-up. Nationalised banks pegged the mark-up lower than the inflation rate, then made profits by buying khas deposit certificates (KDCs) on the side. The result was that the national savings rate, already depressed through the imposition of zakat, went further down.
The government’s position on the imposition of hijab for women in state-run schools is similarly ambiguous. Reports have come in from the districts that the education department has received orders to this effect. This was later denied. It is quite possible that the PM has a more severe religious order in mind for the country. He gave an inkling of it when he banned pop singing from PTV last year. If he wants to know what the people think of this false puritanism he should study the public outcry that followed this ban. The ban also effectively shifted viewership to channels beamed from India.
The appointment of Mr Tarar as president was the first building block of Mr Sharif’s great sanctimonious fraud. Thirty-seven religious parties have jointly announced that they will start a campaign after Eid demanding further imposition of Shariat in Pakistan. His erstwhile ally Maulana Niazi has pointed to the Taliban as the true exemplars of Shariat and asked the government to follow in their footsteps. PML MNA Ijaz-ul-Haq has stepped up his campaign of intimidation by rebuking the PM for not enforcing Shariat. Mr Sharif’s heavy mandate, which has palled on the common man, works only on his party which accepts without criticism all the undemocratic personal fiats handed down by the PM and his family.
The truth of the matter is that Pakistan has submitted to more Islamisation in the past 20 years than any other country in the Islamic world. It is quite another matter that these 20 years have also been the worst years of government corruption and breakdown in all spheres of public life.
The levels of hypocrisy plumbed by this government can be grasped from the fact that alcohol disappears in Islamabad when Parliament is in session. Politicians have acquired second wives on the sly against the law and live the life of pleasure while the face they turn to the public is that of piety. But the people no longer trust them and look at their religious rhetoric as mere cover-up. They know that the massive loan default, standing at 8 percent of the national GDP, is mostly money gouged from the banks by these pious politicians and their cronies. And they know that the wrath of a draconian Taliban-like order will fall on them, the people, and not Pakistan’s plundering ruling elites. When hijab is imposed, hooligans pretending to be the guardians of religion will attack women in the street as they did when General Zia first imposed his brand of religiosity.
What Mr Sharif is doing is nothing new. The rule for all failing autocrats is: when in trouble, clutch at religion. The other rule which Mr Sharif is too intellectually ungifted to grasp is that resource to false religiosity actually hastens the fall. Pakistan’s problem number one is its economy which has to rise, as it were, from its ashes in an international order that rejects the sort of Taliban-like isolationism that the PM will unleash. And President Tarar’s latest nugget that all Muslim countries should put their economies together is too naïve to dignify the high office that has been thrust upon him. But Tarar is simply a small cog in the grand machine Mr Sharif wants to set in motion to avoid the passing of power democratically to anyone who will call him to account. General Zia tried to do it, but failed. There is a lesson in that, if Nawaz Sharif cares to pay heed to it.