The profane chronicle of Sindh is getting murkier. No one quite knows who the villains and heroes are any more.
For much of 1990, Benazir Bhutto was portrayed as the wicked witch of Sindh with Altaf Hussain as her dubious nemesis. Then President Ishaq, who was simply a member of the gaping audience till August 1990, suddenly jumped into the fray. He radically altered the script, introduced Jam Sadiq and Irfanullah Marwat as auxiliary foils to Bhutto and began to pull the strings from Islamabad. But, in the heat and dust of battle, Bhutto was ironically transformed from an uncaring villain into a forlorn heroine pitted against the President’s black-guards led by Jam Sadiq Ali.
Now comes an ominous twist to the plot: Bhutto has faded into the background and the President’s men are merrily thumping one another. The eclipse of Jam’s vicious right-hand man, Mr Irfanullah Marwat, the demise of his protege, the dreaded DIG CIA Mr Samiullah Marwat and the incarceration of Sindhi ideologue Mr G.M. Syed suggest that the sordid drama is spinning out of the President’s control.
The prime minister and the army chief appear to be less than appreciative about the prospects of the President’s team in Sindh. Foreign diplomats in Islamabad, who were solidly behind the President six months ago, are shaking their heads and clucking in disbelief at his partisan meanderings. Even the US Senate, never one to mind its own business but powerful enough to have its way even in foreign lands, is thinking aloud of human rights abuses and Bhutto’s persecution in Sindh.
With Mr Ishaq Khan clutching at straws, the situation is Sindh is becoming more intractable by the day. The recent fiasco regarding Mr G.M. Syed is a case in point. First Mr Syed was billed as a patriot, then he was branded as a traitor and bunged into house-prison.
Mr Syed, as everyone knows, is the oldest, most self-proclaimed separatist in Pakistan. He has been shouting himself hoarse since 1947 but to no avail. Left to his own pathetic devices, Mr Syed would have remained in relative obscurity and harmed no one. But, by being foolishly provoked to arrest him, every regime to date has only succeeded in making him larger than life. Now in the twilight of a largely barren life, he is back in the limelight for no other reason except perhaps to demonstrate the hopeless contradictions in the President’s political strategy, based as it is exclusively on Jam Sadiq’s brutal instincts for survival.
Jam Sadiq’s philosophy is tragically flawed: he will sup with the devil if it helps in keeping Bhutto at bay. So he has mustered all the felons in town to further his dark designs. Grovelling before Mr Syed recently, the Jam signed a certificate of patriotism in exchange for the dubious loyalties of a couple of Sindhi MPs who profess to be supporters of Mr Syed. Thus emboldened, the Syed naturally took the unprecedented opportunity to flog his brand of Sindhi separatism in Nishtar Park in Karachi, seemingly under the auspices of the very state he openly abhors.
Mr Syed was immediately arrested under orders from Islamabad. Jam Sahib, of course, took the hint and weighed in with the arrest of his own advisor Mr Ghazi Salauddin who partook of the celebrations marking the illusion of Sindhu Desh.
This is ridiculous. Jam Sadiq’s politics is visibly bankrupt. He cannot deliver Sindh. By sticking with him, the President is alienating the province, fertilising the ground for extremists like Mr Qadir Magsi and harming the federation.
What are his options? One way out is to impose a neutral administration under Governor’s rule and clean up the province. This means finding a Governor who can disarm both Urdu and Sindhi-speaking thugs, which is easier said than done. Jam Sahib is reported to have distributed over 17,000 arms to his supporters in the province, most of which are in the possession of the MQM. When prime minister Nawaz Sharif ordered the confiscation of these arms last month, he was openly snubbed by Jam Sahib.
The second option is to revert to fair-play and allow democracy to explore a long-term solution based on consensus. The PPP and the MQM must be brought together for a modus vivandi. If Bhutto can put together a coalition government in Sindh, she should be allowed to do so. If she cannot, Islamabad should send Sindh to the polls again and let the real winners try and form a government. Both the MQM and the PPP have presumably learnt from past experience that it doesn’t pay to be intransigent. There can be no better time than now to test the maturity of both sides in matters of statecraft.
We do not need heroes or villains. What we need is good government. The sooner we get it the better. If the President insists upon playing fast and loose with the fate of the province, the charge of villainy will stick to him and erode whatever little goodwill there still remains for him.