If Pakistanis are deeply cynical about their leaders, it is with good reason. In 43 years, we have been herded into three futile wars, battled three internal insurgencies and resisted three military dictators. Two prime ministers, one president, three chief ministers, several generals, many MPs, and countless political and religious leaders have been assassinated. Three constitutions, thirteen federal governments and dozens of provincial ones have been chewed up and spat out. The shadow of dictatorship and martial law has darkened two thirds of our lives. In the process, we have lost over forty billion rupees to numbered accounts abroad, a fifth of our area and one half our population.
Small wonder, then, that the air is thick with a sense of deja vu, tempting us to dismiss the present parody with a surly shrug which says we’ve been through it all before. But there’s the cursed rub. If we sit back and allow this farce to continue, the past will surely seem like a pleasant dream compared to the nightmarish future.
Our creaky economy has been sent cartwheeling by Saddam Hussain’s ambitions. By next year, remittances from the Gulf may shrink by US$ 500m. Rising prices of oil and importables could add US$ 2b to our import bill. A recession abroad will hurt our exports. Money is needed also for elections. Kashmir-related defence expenditures cannot be avoided. By 1991, we are faced with a balance of payments shortfall of US$ 3b. The budget deficit is poised to go through the roof.
Where are we going to find the money to plug these gaps? Reserves are down to one week’s import bill. The Americans have no vested interest left to bail us out yet again: with the evaporation of the cold war, Pakistan’s raison d’etre as a front line state has ceased to excite President Bush’s imagination. If anything, he is irked by our defiant posturing on Kashmir and Afghanistan.
The full blast of looming austerity measures will hit the man on the street next year: rapid inflation, shrinking real incomes, shortages of “necessary goods”. Strikes, lockouts, dacoities, street violence. When the working and lower middle classes are thus squeezed, not all the 7 marla plots in the country nor all the justifications for the military’s budgets will help diminish their anger. This will be especially so if their favourites are foiled at the polls.
Taken in stride, however, a democratically elected government might just hope to middle through the crisis. Frustrating the electoral process by disqualifying Benazir Bhutto and marginalising the PPP would, in this context, be diabolical. It would hasten the hour of reckoning and deepen the crisis. Postponing elections and giving this cockeyed caretaker government a fresh lease of life would further test the state’s plunging credibility. And if, horror of horrors, martial law is unleashed upon us, Pakistan’s goose will be well and truly cooked.
Those gentlemen who stack the cards in Rawalpindi should forswear their sense of outrage and pause to reconsider. True, the PPP has done much wrong. But it is undeniable that the credentials of our self-proclaimed redeemers are no less dubious than those of the party they are bent on persecuting. And no amount of patriotic thundering is going to persuade our people to the contrary.
Ms Benazir Bhutto’s many voters, by all accounts, believe this accountability process to be blatantly rigged. If This farce continues for much longer, the highest and most respected institutions of the state, especially the office of the President, the armed forces and the judiciary, will suffer incalculable and irreversible harm. No country, least of all Pakistan, can afford the luxury of disavowing these pillars of national stability.
Searching for political permutations and combinations today is misplaced concreteness. There is only one strategy which offers us any exit at all, albeit a bumpy one. That is to repose trust in the people and have free, fair elections. Messrs Jatoi and Sharif against Benazir Bhutto. And let the winner grapple with the unenviable task of appeasing the masses.