When a crowd is out for killing it becomes possessed of a strange fever. The victim is always weak and unprotected, it carries no threat of revenge. The powerless victim liberates the crowd from the fear attached to killing. The blows that before could only be dreamed can now be struck with impunity. The crowd acts as if caught in a delirium, unaware of the world about it.
The interim government is such a crowd, the PPP is its victim and the political system of constitutional democracy its killing fields. Events since the dissolution of the National Assembly have confirmed this: the establishment of an interim government whose credibility as a neutral umpire evaporated in the time it took to read through its list of ministers; the dissolution on the grounds of corruption of only the three PPP held assemblies; the setting into motion of an accountability process that is legally arbitrary and politically directed; and the discriminate arrest of PPP ‘terrorists’ in a city infested with armed party workers of all political hues, Karachi.
The killing crowd draws confidence from the fact that the victim is destined to die. And our men of destiny, the army, have quietly made this clear: the PPP as a pretender to power will be killed. As an electoral force, it will be destroyed.
And so the crowd starts baiting the PPP secure in the knowledge that it is only consummating destiny, not committing a crime. True, the countless others who were expected to recognise this destiny and join the crowd have not done so. The ordinary voters seem as yet to be blind to destiny, and the lack of a stampede from the PPP’s ranks indicates that its ex-legislators remain insensitive to it. But the killing crowd remains protected by providence.
However, it is a strange fever that consumes the killing crowd. when the killing has been done, and the delirium has passed, a sudden fear seizes those who had made up the crowd. They recognise themselves in the victim, and they scatter in panic. Those who use such killing crowds to achieve their political ends often fail to understand that the public execution of a dangerous enemy may cut deeper into their own flesh than into that of the enemy. The disintegration of the PNA, the subsequent formation of the MRD and the ensuing isolation of the army was the flight of a killing crowd horrified by the implications of its own actions.
For in the death of Z.A. Bhutto they came to recognise their own deaths, just as in the political demise of the PPP, the politicians of the interim government are fated to see their own political demise. All of them are as threatened by summary dissolution of the assemblies and arbitrary ‘accountability’ processes in the future as the PPP is now. Most are corrupt, and more dangerous in this context, most desire to wield real political power. The very actions that the interim government takes now against the PPP can be repeated by a future killing crowd, but a crowd which sees the members of today’s interim government as its victims. And this they will come to realise just as soon as they break the PPP, just as their forebears in the PNA came to realise it.
But it gets worse. The fevered killing crowd is engaged in an act of self-mutilation — for this is what we are watching. And when the polity itself proudly displays this act of self-condemnation as an act of salvation, who are we to search for the deeper causes of their failure. Yet if we do not do so — and remain content with the simple diagnosis presented to us: greed and corruption — then political maturity will ever elude us.
As a nation we have always been attracted by solutions that appear quick and final. That they never are so is a lesson our people, who stick to their memories of 1977 and remain deeply sceptical of the accountability process, seem to have learnt. But not our politicians, who seem intent on repeating those same mistakes. If this repetition is farce then it certainly has a gallows humour to it. And this humour leaves us cold.