Pakistan is at a critical juncture in history. It can either remain a prisoner of the crushing legacies of Gen Zia ul Haq or boldly move forward to tackle the demands of the post-cold war age. Any government which runs with the hare and hunts with the hound is bound to falter. In the process it will do incalculable harm to economy and society.
Zia’s legacies are many and pervasive. To begin with, there is no societal consensus over his enforced constitutional amendments. On one side, not only is Nawaz Sharif abiding faithfully with his inheritance, he has also hastily appended an amendment of his own which would have done Zia proud. On the other, Benazir Bhutto has drifted further apart by calling for a “new social contract” which envisages wholesale changes in the original 1973 constitution itself.
Then there is the pathological hatred of Messrs Ishaq Khan and Nawaz Sharif for Benazir Bhutto which brooks no rationality, common sense or considerations of national interest. Both will go to any lengths, including provocation of martial law, to ensure she is denied power. Like the Bhutto-Zia problematic of an irresistible force pitted against an immovable object, the Bhutto-Ishaq conundrum has acquired ominous proportions.
Foreign policy is another area where hard-core Ziaists continue to mess around. One day, the Foreign Secretary tells the world that Pakistan will not put its bomb on the shelf. Then defence minister Ghaus Ali Shah chimes in to claim that we have all but readied our bomb for delivery. Yesterday, the PM was gung-ho about a pro-AIG Islamic solution to Afghanistan. Today he’s right behind the neutral interim government proposed by Mr Sevan Benon. Tomorrow, he will be setting his sights on a military victory over Najibullah. Overtly, the PM is restraining the JKLF from precipitating a crisis across the LOC; covertly, he continues to fund the Jamaat-i-Islami to fuel the war in Srinager.
On Islamisation, the PM is at pains to tell the world that he is no fundamentalist, that his Shariat Bill is a sham designed to keep the fundamentalists at arms length. Yet, he is desperately clinging to the likes of Qazi Hussain and Satar Niazi and pandering to their obsolete obsessions as though life would be unbearable without them. Economics minister Sardar Assif Ali is crying himself hoarse over the Federal Shariat Court’s decision to outlaw interest; yet the PM shows no inclination to wrench out the fangs of the FSC and muzzle it from biting again.
The crisis of population growth, which threatens to wreck economic progress, is marked by a contradictory policy of appeasing the mullahs (go-slow, no forceful publicity, paucity of funds) while deceiving the donor agencies (“we’re really serious this time”). The education system, too, retains the sickening, ideological stamp of Ziaism: our children are being taught a poisonous, revisionist version of history which bears no relation to reality. While the government’s privatisation policy is creating a network of liberal-arts, English-medium schools for the upper-middle classes, official rhetoric and syllabi continue to stress the primacy of Urdu and religious orthodoxy in opposition to English and liberalism as fodder for the labouring and lower-middle classes. Thus, the system is geared to create a society of haves and have-nots, denying upward-mobility to the toiling millions.
The judiciary, too, is a victim of such ontological dualities. Although Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence remains the pillar of the state, its foundations have been considerably eroded by the creation of a parallel structure of Islamic laws not based on Ijtehad. Where the lower courts are under official pressure to conform to Hudood laws, the superior courts are under pressure to reverse their decisions or resort to evasive, delaying tactics.
Ethnic passion and sectarian strife, assiduously cultivated as Zia’s fifth column in the 1980s, remain potent destablising forces. The MQM holds Karachi, Sindh and Islamabad to ransom. Yet, instead of boldly disarming its terrorist wings, Mian Nawaz Sharif is mollycoddling Mr Altaf Hussain no end. In Balochistan, the spectre of sectarian strife (persecution of the Zikkris) and ethnic violence (Pathans Vs Baloch) is looming larger than ever before. But the PM sees no reason to crush the trouble-makers. In Punjab, the fanatical ASS has been let loose in Jhang and elsewhere pitted against the TNFJ. But the PM will not allow his anti-terrorist courts to focus their energies on militant obscurantists.
Pakistan’s struggle to hitch a ride to the 21st century is, to all purposes, a struggle between orthodoxy and modernism, obscurantism and scientific enlightenment, perverse diversity and rational assimilation, fundamentalism and liberalism. Zia’s legacies are a painful drag on progress in the right direction. A clean and swift break with the past is wanted. If Mian Nawaz Sharif cannot quickly come to terms with the pressing requirements of the new order which beckons, surgery may be eventually needed to root out the cancer. And, as everyone knows, there is no shortage of impatient surgeons pacing in the wings.