Karachi is in the melting pot again, thanks to Mr Nawaz Sharif and Mr Altaf Hussain. The two have romped in the hay for eighteen months. Ministries have been shared. Briefcases have changed hands. Terrorists have been paroled. Policemen have been murdered. Weapons have proliferated. Dubious constitutional amendments have been spawned.
Now the two have had a spat. There is an eerie sense of deja vu. The same thing happened in 1990-92, except that the chief minister’s role then played by Jam Sadiq Ali, a disgusting Sindhi turncoat, was now handed over to Liaquat Jatoi, also of the same ilk. Then, as now, Mr Ghaus Ali Shah and Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, were Mr Sharif’s anointed “advisors”. The tragedy is that Mr Sharif has truly come full circle to arrive at the beginning and not know it. That is why his “expediency-driven” policies of today may turn out to be no different from those of yesterday and leave a trail of death and devastation in their wake.
The Sindh police has been handed over to Mr Rana Maqbool. Mr Maqbool’s reputation precedes him. As Mr Sharif’s “loyal” SSP and then DIG Punjab from 1988-93, he was in charge of Mr Sharif’s dirty tricks brigade. But when the chips were down from 1993-96, Mr Maqbool slunk away from Mr Sharif and the two were not averse to saying rather uncharitable things about each other. But Allah be praised! The good DIG, who has an MA in English and can quote Eliot and Shakespeare in the same breath, has now been reincarnated as IGP Sindh over the heads of many senior police officers. Since Mr Maqbool’s right hand normally doesn’t know what the left is doing, and since he has moved swiftly to ring wholesale changes in the police department even before the ink on his promotion has dried, we may be forgiven for presuming that he is fated to be a major player in the drama about to be enacted in the hapless city of Karachi.
Then there is the “odd couple” from Islamabad, Mr Ghaus Ali Shah and Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan. Mr Shah, the official “advisor” to the Sindh Governor who would be Chief Minister, may be a duffer in some books but the fellow is as wily as they come and capable of playing all sides at the same time. Indeed, as a one-time chief minister of Sindh, Mr Shah played no mean role in propping up the MQM in the 1980s. Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, of course, is in a class of his own. Highly ambitious, highly articulate, highly conspiratorial — and largely responsible for mollycoddling the MQM into its current state of intransigence — Mr Khan’s secret power plays will doubtless add another murky dimension to the game in Sindh.
On the “other” side we have another “odd couple” in the blunt Chaudhry Shujaat and the soft-spoken General (retd) Majeed Malik. The former has a tendency to strike out on his own while the latter is careful to claim the middle road. How this couple will cope with the shenanigans of the above-mentioned should make for an interesting tragicomedy of errors.
Squatting anxiously in the middle-muddle is Governor Moinuddin Haider. As a simple soldier newly arrived in the sordid and treacherous world of Sharifian politics, General Haider has been placed in the eye of a federally-generated storm and ordered to take the sting out of its tail. We feel sorry for him. Unless he has nerves of steel and has thoroughly imbibed the invaluable Discourses of Niccolo Machiavelli, he could be among the eventual casualties of Nawaz Sharif’s circus.
Apart from the incongruity of the key players entrusted with the task of restoring “law and order” to Karachi, confusion is worst confounded by the situation on the ground. To begin with, the government has been dismissed but the provincial assembly is still in tact — a most novel way of imposing Governor’s Rule which suggests that Mr Sharif has left the bedroom door ajar for a last minute kiss-and-make-up session with Altaf Hussain. Certainly, Governor Haider’s statement that his “operation” will bear no similarity to that of another soldier, General Naseerullah Babar, is quite revealing. The fact that the new army chief and the new Karachi corps commander are, like Governor Haider, also of a certain ‘background’, is also not lost on us, notwithstanding the army chief’s avowed readiness to stage a comeback in Karachi, “if the government thinks it necessary”. No, chief, we assure you, it won’t be necessary, not yet, at any rate.
The key political players are all misplaced. Their objectives are highly dubious. There will be some spring cleaning but no “clean-up” operation in Karachi. In due course, Mr Nawaz Sharif and Mr Altaf Hussain will embrace each other again, dirty deals will be clinched again to divide the spoils of Karachi and we will be beyond the back of square-one.
Perhaps this may be just as well. A failure of Governor’s Rule under a cock-eyed democracy may be just the tonic the people of this country need to stand up and be counted. God knows the time is long past.