The new year has broken with a vengeance. Sooner than expected, the IJI has been marked by an embarrassing rash of squabbles. This could prove tragic.
Take the recent statement by former caretaker PM, Mr Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi, which amounts to admitting that the 1990 elections were, as suspected, indeed rigged by the “powers-that-be”. Despite his marginal backtracking, the damage has been done. His forceful words carry more weight than all the authoritative reams of paper inked by analysts attempting to ‘prove’ widespread rigging; indeed, the PDA’s forthcoming ‘White Paper’ on electoral malpractices has already become redundant. Whatever his tensions with the regime in power, and these are not inconsiderable, Mr Jatoi has, in effect, seriously eroded the legitimacy of his own Alliance government under Mian Nawaz Sharif.
As if this was not explosive enough, another electoral partner of the IJI, Senator Pir Pagaro, has been equally candid in denouncing the election results. Even the most belligerent among Mian Sahib’s detractors could not have been more trenchant. Surely, we all know perfectly well who the “IJI’s rescuing angels”, as Pagaro put it, were last October.
Not to be left behind, of course, is Mr Zahid Sarfraz, MNA, also of the IJI. Mr Sarfraz is fielding his own independent candidate in the by-election in NA-62, Faisalabad, against the official nominee of the Prime Minister. Who is cause for concern is not so much Mr Sarfraz’s implied dissension with his erstwhile leader but the fact that he is extremely worried of rigging by the Punjab Chief Minister’s administration. Furthermore, Mr Sarfraz seems to be saying that he knows how this rigging is to be effected, almost as though he knows the practise t first hand. That is why he has instructed his polling agents not to leave their booths until after they have all received signed result-sheets from the presiding officers before 7:30 pm on polling day.
Curious, isn’t it, how all these remembrances of things past — by a former Prime Minister, the head of one section of the Muslim League and the former Interior Minister, all members of the ruling party, all people who were in excellent positions to know what transpired on that fateful day of October 24, 1990 — tie in so beautifully with that the PDA and notable sections of the free press have charged from day one: that the last elections were the most rigged elections in our history.
As if all these deleterious observations by his partners weren’t shameful enough, Prime Minister Mian Nawaz Sharif has also to contend with the tippling confessions of his Chief Minister in Sindh, the inimitable Jam Sadiq Ali. “Yes, I drink”, he has proclaimed, leaving no doubt in anyone’s mind that he’s preferring to Johnny Walker, Black Label, and not to the daily tablespoons of Waterbury’s Compound that his good doctor in London recommended. No wonder President Ishaq, in his infinite wisdom, took mercy on the new regime he has so painstakingly erected and hastily prorogued the National Assembly just when it was girding up its loins to discuss the promised Shariat Bill in all its transparent glory.
It is begging the issue to try and discover a conspiracy theory behind all these developments. The IJI is an artificial construct put together by the ubiquitous establishment to destroy the Peoples Party in particular and the democratic aspirations of the people of Pakistan in general. Increasingly, Mian Sahib’s government, notwithstanding his competence or good intentions, lacks legitimacy, even in the eyes of its own members.
The writing on the wall for both Mian Sahib and Benazir Bhutto is clear enough. Democracy can only survive if these two shun their personal antagonisms and put their shoulders together to thwart the machinations of the establishment. Neither Jam Sadiq in Sindh, nor the Shariat Bill, nor indeed the much flaunted privatisation plans for reviving the economy will come to Mian Sahib’s rescue when the establishment thinks he has become dispensable. All these revelations, and the many others to inevitably follow, will be viewed in time to come like so many shots across his bow, much like all the complaining letters the President wrote to Benazir Bhutto as a prelude to booting her out last August.