General Pervez Musharraf is a straight-talking fellow. What you see and hear is what you get. No double talk, no diplomatic niceties. This endears him to the headline-hungry media. But he is also inclined to get carried away by the exuberance of his own verbosity. When that happens he gets into a spot of trouble. A case in point is his misunderstood remark some months ago before a panel of The Washington Post editors about “Pakistani women lining up to get raped so that they can get Canadian nationalities”.
Now we have to contend with the fallout of his shooting from the hip during a briefing to the media in Karachi on the need for building consensus on the Kalabagh Dam. But, consensus or not, the Kalabagh dam will be built, he ended up saying. What if some post-Musharraf government should stop the project mid-way, he was asked. That won’t happen, he confided, because “Punjab would topple any government” that tried to do that! Surely, that’s the last thing he should have said to a Sindhi audience decrying Punjabi dominance and high-handedness over the decades. From this many commentators have concluded that Punjab and the Punjabi ‘Pakistan’ army are on one side and the rest of Pakistan on the other on this issue.
But that is not the case. Benazir Bhutto, a Sindhi, once remarked that if the dam could be renamed it might well be built. This implied that a dam at Kalabagh was technically feasible and economically desirable but politically prickly for reasons of historical provincial distrust. Similarly, Nawaz Sharif, a Punjabi whose regime included sub-nationalists from the NWFP and Balochistan, talked time and again about the need to build the dam without a squeak from his fiery provincial partners. It is also well-known that many Sindhi, Baloch and Pakhtun politicians who are publicly anti-dam are privately dispassionate about the issue.
Is it conceivable that prime ministers and technical experts can lie about the viability of a national project on the basis of their provincialism or ethnicity? Equally, is it inconceivable that marginalized sub-nationalists should whip up passions to advance their agendas and win popular support?
Water is a life and death issue for people. So is politics for politicians. But if “enemy states” like India and Pakistan can settle such matters via bilateral agreements like the Indus Waters Treaty which has withstood war and dismemberment and nuclear rattling, why can’t provinces within states find an acceptable resource-sharing model? This leads to other key questions that have a distinct bearing on the issue: Why haven’t we been able to implement the 1991 water accord between the provinces? Why is the National Finance Commission Award on resource sharing still hanging fire? Why is Balochistan constantly grumbling about gas royalties? Why is the Council of Common Interests dormant? Why is the concurrent constitutional list still alive and kicking despite the constitutional provision for its abolition two decades ago?
If the “unfinished agenda of partition” is the unresolved Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan, the “unfinished agenda of independence” is the unfulfilled promise of a truly democratic and federal Pakistan. Fifty eight years down the line, we are further away from democracy and federalism than ever before. Three bouts of military-presidential rule have castrated democracy and federalism because the Punjabi-dominated military is obsessed with notions of national security and budgetary requirements that demand highly centralized decision-making and resource-generating state structures. Is it any wonder, then, that suspicions should abound among the powerless civilians and the hapless provinces about the credibility and intentions of a military president-general who is going through the motions of drumming up a consensus on the Kalabagh dam but who is determined to go ahead with the project even without it?
The Kalabagh dam would be built on solid foundations if it followed rather than preceded the construction of a national consensus on the type of democracy and extent of federalism that Pakistanis want. This would entail abiding by the word and spirit of the 1973 constitution that was the first and last truly consensual covenant between the diverse peoples, ideologies and provincial sentiments of Pakistan. Every constitutional amendment since then, especially those by General Zia ul Haq and Gen Musharraf, has taken us away from that goal. The tragedy is that, notwithstanding the best personal intentions in the world to do good by Pakistan, Gen Musharraf’s institutional compulsions are deepening the fissures in state and society.
There is, of course, no such thing as a complete or unequivocal consensus in any democracy. Indeed, by definition, democracy is decision-making and governance on the basis of the majority sentiment. So it is not the lack of a complete consensus that poses problems for the Kalabagh dam. It is the lack of a popularly and freely elected government mandated to take such a decision. Under the circumstances, General Musharraf would be advised to focus on ensuring a free and fair election in which he, as Mr Musharraf, can join hands with the mainstream majority not just to build the Kalabagh dam but also to resolve the outstanding federal issues of the day.