Ayaz Amir
Taking to the road by Ayaz Amir
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Islamabad diary
Friday, March 12, 2010
Ayaz Amir
It is not given to everyone to be this lucky: to be able to cast off the cares of the world and take to the road. My own fantasy used to be to put on saffron or, safer in our parts, green, and walk down the length of the Indus to Lal Shahbaz’s shrine at Sehwan. But it has remained a fantasy.
In my mind I trek the far corners of the globe. In actual fact I am a desk-bound person, overwhelmed by the thought of having to prepare for a journey.
Thirty years ago in midsummer — and summer in Sindh can be cruel business — I took the train to Sehwan to attend the annual urs. That journey remains etched in my memory.
I went in poverty and had nowhere to stay. But the assistant station master, taking pity on me, gave me a room. Only at night would I make use of that room. My days were spent wandering or sitting in chai-khanas, all by myself, alone in that bustling multitude.
I would just go and sit in the shrine and watch the faqirs, lost to the world, dancing the dhamal. Outside the shrine gypsy girls, drawn from all corners of the desert, would be dancing in a state of complete abandon: dusky and sinuous goddesses, with bright lips and laughing eyes. The drumbeaters were beside themselves too. Yet there was no levity about that performance. It was more an act of devotion, a form of worship.
Pakistanis on the whole are bad dancers not because there is anything wrong with our limbs but because there is some kind of problem with our souls. Deep down where it really matters, we are not completely free. Something hems us in, most probably because we seem to have inherited not the wisdom of the ages but the fear of the ages. The confusion in our minds about our direction as a nation arises from this disability: the imprisonment of the soul clouding the ability to think clearly.
Why is it so easy for foreigners to impose on us not so much their will as their thinking? Why do we start dancing so readily to any tune played in our ears? Why has physical liberation not been matched by mental liberation? My guess is because deep down we are unsure of ourselves. We are not a confident nation although, God knows, there is no reason to feel so insecure.
Those were the early Zia years when the malevolence of his brand of self-serving ideology — from the effects of which we are not yet wholly recovered — had begun to poison every aspect of life in Pakistan. But Sehwan was untouched by that hypocrisy. Maybe the remoteness of interior Sindh had something to do with it. Or maybe it was the power of Sindh’s foremost saint to keep evil at bay. I have no idea how things are in Sehwan today.
Years later I had the good fortune to attend the urs of Shah Abdul Latif at Bhitai. I went not in poverty, as I was a guest of the Sindh government. We were lodged well and fed well, such being the ways of government in our part of the world. But it is the poverty-attendant journey to Sehwan which casts a warmer glow in my mind.
Today a similar journey would entail slightly different problems. I would probably have to take my laptop with me, such an inseparable part of my travelling gear this wonder of marvellous science has become. In fact I can only stay in maddening Chakwal, as much of the time I do, not because there are unlisted pleasures to be had there which are unattainable elsewhere (although about this too, I suppose, a tale could be told), but because it is as connected to the god of the modern universe, the internet, as any other place on earth.
What I still do for a living, my journalism, is now wholly dependent upon this form of communion, remaining connected to the net, possibly with a fast broadband connection. So wherever I go I, who came very late to the miraculous ease of computer writing, must take my laptop with me.
All the more so, because the internet is no longer just about work. It is also about pleasure, or I should say entertainment which is the more contemporary word. This is because of its exhaustible resources, the almost trackless realms of music and literature (or, needless to say, pornography, should anyone’s inclination run in that direction) which are part of its matchless domain.
So if I am on the road to Sehwan or indeed any other shrine of the chosen I would have to take my magic box with me, addicted as I now am to my fix of music at night before slipping into the kingdom of dreams or, as is the case more often, into the stuff of troubled sleep and strange nightmares.
It could be anything: Noor Jehan at her best in semi-classical mode, and at her best there was no one like her; K L Saigal around whose voice, I am convinced, the Lord of the Hosts lingered while he went about shaping it; Lata at her best — try this one as an example: sapnon mein sajan kee do baatein, ik yaad rahi ik bhool gayi; Kamla Jharia (sample her, she’s worth it); some of Talat’s offbeat geets; some of Surraiya’s; anything in raag yaman kalyan, especially by the great Ustad Amir Khan; this from Ustad Ghulam Mustafa Khan which I keep listening to all the time, bahut bechain hai dil: and so on. The list is endless.
Who could have thought of YouTube only a few years ago? This is another miracle not so much of science as of the universe. For anchorites in the desert there was no more compelling, vision of Elysium than of an extended garden with enduring shades and never-ending streams. For the modern anchorite (if this be not a contradiction in terms) Elysium would be incomplete without YouTube and broadband internet access.
Indeed, even when the walls of Jericho come tumbling down and the mountains are one with the seas, cyberspace as we know it will perhaps remain unaffected. Imagine, the world coming to an end but not cyberspace.
We in Pakistan have no direct access to opera or ballet. Both are not part of our culture or tradition and on our radio and television they simply do not figure. This is a pity because both are great art forms and to be deprived of them is to miss out on a vital aspect of the human experience. This omission is easily filled with YouTube.
The great names of opera that enthusiasts of my generation are familiar with are, and this is just a rough and short list: Callas, Tebaldi, Pavarotti, Domingo, Tito Gobi, Kiri Te Kanawa, etc. But there are so many new faces out there today that are dazzling, as good as anything happening before.
In music I am an amateur. I think I have an ear for it but about its theory or philosophy I know next to nothing. A dissertation on it I would not be able to deliver. But a good voice and a good song I think I can recognise. And it is in this spirit that I say that if at all interested in opera (and here again I am at pains to stress that I am not addressing the highbrow specialist) you will thank me if you go to YouTube and click Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazon.
This will open a world of beauty and virtuosity that you may not have seen, the perfect antidote to the depression and anxiety of the age of terror. Netrebko is the hottest face in contemporary opera. But, more important, the hottest voice too. Villazon is handsome in a way, I am given to understand, women die for (and perhaps for this reason the kind of face most unhandsome men detest). He too is an extraordinary singer. And it doesn’t really matter if the words are not understood. Opera primarily is about mood and feeling.
Taking to the road then takes on a slightly different meaning: remaining cut off from the world but remaining connected to the mysterious world of cyberspace. I suppose this would be a new form of mysticism.
Email: winlust@yahoo.com
Star-gazing — for what it is worth by Ayaz Amir
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Islamabad diary
Friday, March 05, 2010
Ayaz Amir
As I have had occasion to mention before, Islamabad since its birth has been a city dedicated to nothing so much as intrigue and conspiracy. It has always been a dead city. But without the grist to its mills provided by conspiracy it would be deader still.
And March, no doubt because of the influence of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar — the one Shakespearean play most educated Pakistanis seem to have read — has a strange influence on the Pakistani mood. Ever since I entered the hallowed portals of journalism — and this was a good thirty years ago — I have seen March bringing forth its regular crop of stories about upheavals in the halls of government.
So it is this year, with any number of dedicated weathermen foretelling storm and thunder, and the twilight of this or that god, in the days that remain before ‘cruel’ April comes along — which in turn will give rise to more theories and the setting of more precious deadlines.
Eliot is another poet the educated Pakistani is familiar with, if only in brief and in passing. And it is his line — April is the cruellest month — which has a sharp impact on all veterans of the conspiracy trail. If March looks to be exciting, wait for the first week of April.
If conspiracy theories were our only headache it would be no great matter. Conspiracies are born and they die. But the lawyers’ movement and the subsequent rise of a judiciary assailed by intimations of greatness — I don’t know how else to put it — have given rise to the birth of a warrior class in the media whose swordsmen flatter themselves that it was they who got rid of Musharraf and they who, in tandem with the lawyers, installed and reinstalled their lordships on their exalted chairs of justice.
This is a narrative of self-assertion — history not so much written, much less revised, as history entirely self-invented. From this embellished account of the past, in which the fable-writers are the self-appointed heroes and the knights in shining armour, arises the conviction that those writing these tales are invested with the authority to lay down the parameters of the good and the bad. If there’s one thing we have been surplus in, it is self-righteousness. Now comes this added dimension. Not one amongst these knights would be elected a councillor in a local election. This does not stop them from thinking they must have the last word on how to run the Republic.
Adding to the pain-in-the-neck feeling is a total absence of a sense of humour. These reformers do not take themselves lightly. My sneaking suspicion is that if they had the power they would be little different from Muslim Khan of Swat or the other icons of the true path now scattered by the army’s advance.
Last September was set as the hour of the system’s demise by these cheerleaders of doom. After President Asif Ali Zardari sacrificed a few more black rams — I joke not — to ward off the evil eye, the deadline was pushed to October, then November. Winter was a winter of discontent for this crowd because the object of its affections, the President, just wouldn’t go away. Now the alarm clocks are set for March when much is expected to happen — bruising arguments over Swiss cases, a package of constitutional amendments, and, arising from these, fresh tensions between the executive and judiciary.
My take — and let there be egg on my face if I am out of sync with the prevailing winds– is more akin to what the great Faiz Ahmed Faiz once said about the state of the republic when asked as to what was likely to happen. Nothing much, he said. At least this line has the merit of mirroring the condition of the Pakistani soul. We yearn for things to be different. But we lack the capacity, or the will, to make this happen. Which makes us the children of the status quo, from whom it is foolish to expect any mad rush to the barricades.
In fact taking to the barricades is no longer an option in Pakistan. The working class is dead, all signs of life fled from its care-worn battalions. Pakistan’s students, the mass of them, are confused or they are under the sway of the student wing of the Jamaat-e-Islami, the Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba. Indeed, being confused and under the influence of the Jamiat amount to much the same thing. When the obituary of Pakistani education is written — and it shouldn’t be long before this task comes to the fore — the role of the Jamaat/Jamiat in bringing education to its knees should figure in a big way.
Those centres of education, like LUMS, which have some traces of idealism in them are too small to matter. What matters are the fortresses of reaction, such as the Punjab University and what was once such an open place, the Quaid-e-Azam University. And they, sadly, will not be taken out or reduced short of something like the army’s current manoeuvres in the tribal areas.
Thus, the only change possible in Pakistan is through palace intrigue or army movement (the two of course closely connected). But even palace intrigue requires a measure of audacity and, I suspect, that despite the revival of army confidence because of the success of its arms in Swat and Waziristan, the army’s hands are so full, and therefore tied, because of its military commitments, that the space which has traditionally permitted it, in fact encouraged it, to dream dreams of ambition and political glory is very restricted.
The desire for adventurism may be there and today’s generals would scarcely be mortal if the thought did not flit through their minds occasionally — occasionally? — that the politicians were again making a mess of things and the country would be better served if the army were to step in. But the circumstances are not propitious for fleshing out such thoughts.
The times are hard for the country. They are also hard for the army. And as our relationship today with the United States is more physical than anything else — thanks to the Afghan conflict we are locked arm-in-arm as never before — external sensibilities become a factor in domestic calculations like never before. Given the record of military rule in Pakistan, the Americans would have to be out of their minds to encourage or even countenance any notions of Bonapartism.
This leaves, to use a shorthand phrase, judicial activism. Their lordships are expanding the sphere of their influence but whether this leads to the kind of structure-threatening clash some of the media are talking about, and indeed eagerly expecting, is a matter of speculation.
It doesn’t help matters of course that we have a President on whose flak jacket every barb sticks, such is the reputation he carries. Ronald Reagan was called the Teflon president because nothing would stick to him. Here we have the opposite phenomenon. And it’s not just a matter of sticking. The President carries heavy baggage. There’s nothing make-believe about that.
But March may just bring about the miracle which can stabilise things. If the 17th Amendment goes, and the President not only bids farewell to his extraordinary powers but has the good sense to willingly acquiesce in this diminution of authority, he becomes a Rafiq Tarar or Fazal Ellahi Ch. If this were to happen — meaning thereby, that if the government has the collective wisdom to bring this about — the storm clouds abate and the focus shifts from the Presidency to the government and Parliament, as it should. In other words, the nature of the debate at once changes.
This will be bad news for the media warriors who are virtually frothing at the mouth about corruption and national cleansing. But it will be good news for Parliament and democracy. The political class will still face the challenge of improving its performance and getting down to the brass tacks of addressing the economic crisis. But that’s another story.
Email: winlust@yahoo.com
The latest climb-down and related matters by Ayaz Amir
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Islamabad diary
Friday, February 19, 2010
Ayaz Amir
Incompetence of this high order may not be against the laws of nature. It is certainly against all known laws of politics. The credibility of this government was already poor. Now after this latest debacle over the appointment of judges it stands shot through and through. Its word already carried little weight. Who will believe it now?
Just days ago Prime Minister Yusuf Gilani had shown a touch of steel while speaking in the National Assembly, injecting thereby a spark of life into a virtually demoralised and lost party. But all in vain because his defiance was tied to a lost cause: the appointment of judges. Differences of interpretation there may be on this score but the bulk of legal opinion maintains that in this regard the final word is that of My Lord the Chief Justice.
A climb-down from the high position the government had taken was thus inevitable. But it is the manner of the climb-down — akin more to capitulation — which is likely to exact a heavy political price in days to come. Even on the one point where the government could have stood its ground — Justice Ramday’s ad hoc re-appointment — it has beaten a retreat. If extensions are not a good thing — there being a near-consensus in the country that we are better off without them — the Chief Justice could pertinently have been asked why Justice Ramday was so indispensable.
But by Wednesday afternoon when the CJ came calling on the PM — in itself an unusual event — any notion of standing up to anyone or for anything seemed to have deserted the PM, defiance transformed, almost miraculously, into all-out conciliation. Speaking in the National Assembly that evening, the PM was a subdued man, like someone roughly chastened by the hand of immediate experience.
Right from the start questions were asked about this government’s capacity and competence. In the wake of this latest debacle they are bound to intensify. It is not that conciliation should not have been attempted. But why the necessity in the first place to get into a mess from which the only way out was abject surrender?
Reinforcing folly is no good thing. This mantra every army recites. But self-created folly, that too repeatedly, inevitably raises questions about one’s ability and understanding.
Starry-eyed souls, no doubt clutching at straws, had convinced themselves that the PM’s stature had risen in recent days, especially when set against the ineptitude radiating from the Presidency. Alas for short-lived hopes. After this spectacular climb-down Gilani stands reduced to his original size. And it’s going to remain like this, politics being a cruel business where blown credibility is never easy to restore.
But Gillani has had his moment in the sun. Two years is about the average span of Pakistani prime ministers and he will soon be completing two years in office. What more can he have hoped for?
To his credit, he hasn’t been a Farooq Leghari to Zardari, standing staunchly by his benefactor in the storm unleashed by the NRO judgment. But standing by Zardari, because of the baggage he carries and the reputation for unrivalled skill in high financial matters he holds, is an impossible undertaking. Angels would have failed in this endeavour. How could a mere mortal have succeeded?
Any hopes of this government changing its stripes or reforming itself must now be buried. President Zardari has proved many things, none more conclusively the notion that he is incapable of change. In his praise it is said he is loyal to his friends. His record shows he is also loyal to his failings. His reputation, as mentioned above, is testimony to his skill in matters of high, and arcane, finance. But his ineptitude for government stands fully exposed.
Last February he had set out to conquer Punjab when taking advantage of Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif’s unseating at the hands of the Dogar judiciary he imposed governor’s rule in the province. We know how that adventure ended. It might have been supposed that proper lessons had been learnt. But this February, almost as if to commemorate the memory of last year’s discomfiture, we saw a fresh adventure unfolding: this time an attempt to take on the Supreme Court, with what results we all know.
On many counts Zardari is a lucky man. Only luck could have brought him thus far. Only luck explains his rise to the presidency, no small matter even in a third world country. But his luck seems to be wearing thin. He is now in waters too deep for him and how long he manages to remain afloat is now a matter of intense speculation.
We know his legal advisers, faces virtually, all of them, out of a rogues’ gallery. Will they face any music? Not likely, given the President’s loyalty to his acolytes. Which almost makes this a Greek tragedy. You know where certain things will lead. But you cannot escape their shadow.
It wouldn’t much matter if this were just a personal tragedy. But this is also tragedy for the nation. We know the President’s proclivities, his strengths and weaknesses and where he comes from. But we are prisoners of the dynamics which have brought him to his present position. It was Hugo who said there was nothing worse than an incurable destiny.
Turning to related matters, Iftikhar Chaudry is already the most unusual Chief Justice in our history. Other high jurists have stood up to military dictators but for all their rectitude and adherence to principle they fell by the wayside and their names are only dimly remembered. Chaudry is one high judge who stood up to a dictator and not only survived to tell the tale but has been twice restored to his position. Which makes him the Pakistani Muhammad Ali. Ali won his heavyweight crown thrice. So it has been with My Lord the CJ.
In the museum of his triumphs hang many trophies, the Zardari/Gilani climb-down the latest in the list. He has still much to do and the way ahead is long and, given our national troubles, full of pitfalls. But the responsibility on his shoulders relates as much to what he should do as to what he should refrain from doing.
A fount of justice and hope for the deprived and downtrodden he must remain, and officialdom must continue to quake at the prospect of being summoned in his presence. He must remain a friend of the environment and of trees (about the most threatened things in our Republic) as he has always been. Of all wrong-doers, no matter how highly placed, he must remain the scourge.
But the time may also have come for a slave, even if an invisible one, to stand by his side and whisper into his ear, according to the Roman custom, “Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal.” Power and popular acclaim can go to anyone’s head: general, popular demagogue or even a judge. If there was a time, as his critics maintain, when he had a weakness for publicity, he is now far above the need for publicity to prop up his self-esteem. Through courage and grit, he has already carved out a unique place for himself.
One of the hallmarks of greatness is the ability to concentrate on the essential and ignore or do away with the non-essential. There are important matters before the superior courts. They should concentrate on those. It should be none of their business to fix the price of sugar or petroleum products. If the judiciary’s is to be the last word as regards judicial appointments, does it not follow that the executive authority’s word should be the final word as far as higher bureaucratic appointments are concerned? To each its own. That is the principle on which a federation runs.
It might also help to take to heart Bacon’s admonition, in his essay ‘Of Judicature’: “Judges ought to remember that their office is…to interpret law, and not to make law or give law: else will it be like the Authority claimed by the Church of Rome…” There is also much to be said for the related caveat: “An over-speaking judge is no well tuned cymbal.”
In fact the entire essay is no bad guide for any judiciary.
Email: winlust@yahoo.com
The (misdirected) yearning for change by Ayaz Amir
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Friday, February 12, 2010
Ayaz Amir
The Pakistani non-voting middle class represents a strange phenomenon, a category waiting to be defined in some seminal work on the social sciences. This class will not be bothered to vote. It will stay aloof from the political process and will be represented in no political party. But it will bay the loudest against plummeting national values and the pressing need for immediate — almost revolutionary — change.
The members of this class will, for the most part, be living in the better-off parts of our cities. Their preferred mode of transport — which sets them apart from most of their countrymen — is the privately-owned motor car. Their children go to ‘English-medium’ schools — and why shouldn’t they when Urdu-medium education is in a state of crisis, and when mass education has never been a priority in the Islamic Republic?
There is nothing to doubt the sincerity, or call it the angst, of the non-voting Pakistani middle class. Its yearning for change is genuine enough. But since, as far as politics is concerned, its members are merely spectators, that too from a distance, and not participants or activists, they are powerless to affect or determine the course of events.
Which doesn’t prevent them from talking. In fact talk, often hysterical talk, and fulmination become substitutes for action. Foreigners wonder at our capacity for talk and its close cousin, cynicism, and our relative inability to translate some of that talk into action. There can be million-man marches against the Iraq war in New York and London but not in any Pakistani city. Because those who should be in the forefront of such activity are out of touch with the multitude.
And when the multitude, for want of anything better, votes in the PPP to power, or the PML-N, or as far as Karachi is concerned the MQM, the non-voting middle class, especially its English-speaking component, is aghast at the low intelligence, or non-discernment, of the Pakistani electorate. Over time this attitude fuels a contempt for the political process.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was no Ho Chi Minh. But he crossed class lines when he appealed to the masses and shaped his politics around them. So much water has flowed down our rivers but our non-voting middle class, what Marx might have called (but didn’t) the sick bourgeoisie, never forgave him for this sin. Even today when so many other problems have arisen, Bhutto remains the bete noire of this class.
The inertness of the middle class leads to another surprising outcome: hysterical calls, whenever a civilian government is in place, for ’surgical’ intervention to set right the alarming course of events, or the dire state of the nation. There is a rich irony in this juxtaposition: inactivity which nothing can shake matched only by a passion for alarmism.
This is dangerous territory. The power of ’surgical’ intervention in Pakistan rests with only one institution: the army. Hence it is scarcely an accident that every military coup — whether led by Ayub, Yahya, Zia or Musharraf — was not only welcomed (that would be too lukewarm) but hailed by Pakistan’s apology of a middle class. In other climes the middle class has been the principal bulwark of democracy. Here it is just the other way round.
For military folly the patience of this class is virtually limitless. But no sooner does the political wheel turn and a civilian government occupies the landscape devastated by military rule, the chattering classes — drawn mostly from the non-voting middle class — come into their own and start railing mercilessly against civilian ineptitude.
There is no denying civilian ineptitude. We have more than our share of it and our political parties and their leaders would benefit from a stint in purgatory or Chinese-style re-education camps. But that is hardly the point.
There is no gainsaying the corruption marking Benazir Bhutto’s two stints as prime minister. There is no denying the inadequacy, to use no stronger expression, defining the PML-N’s stints in power. Who can deny President Asif Ali Zardari’s reputation or, arguably, his inadequacy in so many particulars for the office he holds.
But if there were those who argued in days gone by that Benazir Bhutto should be allowed to complete her term, and if there was a need to punish her or kick her out of office it should be done through the ballot box; and if there were some who said that throwing out Nawaz Sharif before his time was up was not a good idea; or if there are those who say that black as his misdeeds may be President Zardari should not be the object of any ’surgical’ intervention — whether from the army or any other quarter, and when I say any other quarter I hope my meaning is clear — it was not out of past love for Benazir Bhutto or Nawaz Sharif or present love for Zardari but only to press home the point that ’surgical’ interventions, invariably and without exception, do more harm than good.
And that the curative powers of the normal political process, even if at times they appear tediously long, are more beneficial in the long run than any shotgun approach. After four military coups it might have been supposed that as a nation we were wiser on this score. But the impatience of the chattering classes, more than evident in talk-shows and newspaper columns, makes it clear that the hunger for ‘heavenly’ interventions remains as strong as ever.
This is to forget that surgical solutions are all of a piece. They yield no Ataturks or de Gaulles, at least not in our context. Let us be under no illusions on this count. They only lead to variations on the themes of Zia or Musharraf.
Two years of this dispensation are already over. Three years remain for the next elections — that is, if the heavens do not intervene in between. Bhutto formed the PPP in 1967 and it was only three years later that he was triumphant at the polls. If there are people of sincerity and goodwill, and ability — the first two being of no use without the third — who want to re-do, rethink or remake Pakistan, they have these three years to organise themselves and make a difference where it matters — not in TV studios or drawing rooms (the favourite haunts of the chattering classes) but the slums of our cities and the dusty lanes of rural Pakistan.
Just as music comes from musical instruments, justice from courts, the cleaning of cities from efficient municipal services, and good food from a good kitchen, political change can only come through the political process. For those worried about the state of Pakistan — and there is no shortage of such souls — there is no alternative to participating in the political process, apart of course from the march of the Triple One Brigade. And, surely, we don’t want that, do we?
One more point: the lawyers’ movement was the first occasion in our tumultuous history that parts of the non-voting middle class were shaken out of their habitual inactivity. This movement was something they could relate to and hence they were inspired by it. But then came a halt to this process that should have been carried forward when the movement’s leadership committed the fatal error of boycotting the Feb 2008 elections.
After the elections the initiative lay not with the lawyers’ movement, as it had done for much of 2007, but with the political leadership thrown up by the elections. And much as the chattering classes may wish to deny it, the restoration of the rightful judiciary happened not because of the lawyers’ movement, by then in debt to the PML-N which was helping sustain it, but by the political process.
Aitzaz Ahsan, Munir Malik, Ali Ahmed Kurd, Tariq Mahmood, to name only these four, should have been in the present National Assembly. How the tone of this assembly would have improved. Imran Khan too should have been in it instead of being a prophet in the wilderness as he is at present, his tone increasingly raucous as he points with strained finger to the promised land.
India achieved independence, and Pakistan became a separate state, through the workings of the political process. No saviour will set Pakistan right. If Pakistan is to be rethought and remodelled — there being an urgent necessity for both — this will only happen through the political process. History leaves us with no other choice.
Email: winlust@yahoo.com
Fumbling response to a ‘cold’ doctrine by Ayaz Amir
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Islamabad diary
Friday, February 05, 2010
Ayaz Amir
We live in a world of our own, obsessed with self-created problems, and lashing out at windmills which, much of the time, seem wild creations of our own imagination. To real problems we are oblivious. We are not even aware, as keenly as we should be, of our own neighbourhood.
It is nothing short of criminal that our media outlets don’t have full-time correspondents based in Kabul and Delhi. Our knowledge of our two neighbours, to the west and east of us, is largely derived from outside sources — western news outlets — when it should be through our own eyes and ears.
Our better reporters — and reporting is a department in which we are not very good –would be far better occupied covering India and Afghanistan than indulging in the mindless masochism of internal bloodletting.
My Lord the Chief Justice, famous now for his suo moto initiatives, could consider taking notice of this strange proclivity.
India formulated its Cold Start War Doctrine way back in April 2004 but we in Pakistan have yet to wake up to its full implications. General Musharraf, our generalissimo then, was into other things: prolonging his hold on power and, in the process, making a mess of everything. Strategy was a word always on his lips. He just couldn’t do without it. But did he ever speak of this new war doctrine?
It goes to General Ashfaq Kayani’s credit that he is trying to educate Pakistani public opinion about what it means and why, with it around, Pakistan must be wary. This is also a way of conveying to our American allies that try as they might to wean us from our preoccupation with India, the perceived threat from that quarter will look real enough to Pakistani eyes when the Indian military command chooses to deal in the imagery of surgical strikes and rapid armour movements.
For the Cold Start Doctrine is not out of science fiction. It is now the heart of India’s war plans against Pakistan. In simple terms what it envisages is the creation of up to eight battle groups — comprising armour, mechanized infantry and self-propelled artillery, backed by close air support — capable of mobilising rapidly and carrying out fast, ’surgical’ operations against targets in Pakistan, without crossing Pakistan’s nuclear threshold. This at least is the theory and to all theories must be attached Field Marshal von Moltke’s timeless observation that no battle plan survives the first contact with the enemy.
What is Pakistan’s nuclear threshold? What is, for that matter, any nuclear power’s nuclear threshold. This has never been tested and to the extent that India’s new war doctrine makes bold assumptions about something yet unknown, it rests on uncharted territory.
Anyhow, cold start doctrine may sound new-fangled but it is actually the rediscovery of blitzkrieg — lightning war — by the Indian military, 70 years after its application, to devastating effect, by the German Wehrmacht in the Second World War. Donald Rumsfeld, the American defence secretary, may have used ’shock and awe’ for the first time in 2003 to describe the American invasion of Iraq. But the original shock and awe was Hitler’s destruction of Poland in 1939 and his defeat of France a year later. The Israelis replicated blitzkrieg in 1967 when they defeated Egypt, Jordan and Syria in a war which lasted for no more than six days.
These are the images, these the memories, behind India’s cold start doctrine, the idea that if Pakistan is up to any mischief, and if it is to be taught a lesson, the way to deal with it is in the fashion of blitzkrieg: rapid armoured thrusts, backed by heavy airpower, to hit at chosen targets in Pakistan and cripple the capacity of its army to retaliate. This presupposes rapid mobilization and the ability to attack before Pakistan has a chance to respond. In other words, catching Pakistan unawares.
The 1971 war apart, which was really a case of us putting our follies at the service of India, our other wars were leisurely affairs, with more of fixed line fighting than any notion of movement or manoeuvre. The essence of the new doctrine is mobility backed by overwhelming force.
And why has India thought it necessary to formulate such a doctrine? Because of the frustrating realisation that despite its conventional superiority it has not been able to put a stop to what it sees as Pakistani ‘adventurism’, as in Kargil, or infiltration across the Line of Control to keep alight the flames of insurgency. Cold start is supposed to confer on the Indian military a fresh range of options to choose from, and to exercise.
All this is pretty dangerous stuff and the least it should trigger is a serious debate in Pakistan. But we are caught up in other things and because our domestic woes are so overwhelming we just don’t seem to have the time, or perhaps even the ability, to take in what may be happening in our dangerous neighbourhood, arguably now one of the world’s great flashpoints.
We must contend with another problem in that successive military coups have bred an ingrained suspicion of military intentions. So that when an army chief, in this case Gen Kayani, talks about, say, the threat from India, there is no shortage of doubting thomases who jump to conclusions and wonder what trick he may have up his sleeve. Despite the rehabilitation of the army’s image under Kayani, the gulf of suspicion between the army and public sentiment is still wide open.
Even so, we need to wake up to certain things. And the first one is to the foundations of blitzkrieg. Lightning war is not a luxury that poor countries or armies can afford. It puts a premium on tanks, and fast-moving artillery and hordes and hordes of fighters swooping down from the skies. In this day and age blitzkrieg also means conventional short range missiles, including cruise missiles, to soften the enemy’s defences. All this only a rich economy can sustain.
And if from 2004 onwards Indian military planners have made mobility and the overwhelming concentration of force as the central pillars of their thinking this is only because the Indian economy has grown to the point where such planning is no longer a fantasy.
We can’t match India tank to tank or plane to plane. Such an arms race would be suicidal for us. Nor is it enough to say that our nuke capability is an adequate defence against conventional military attack. It is not. Down this path is Armageddon and even to think along such lines is to enter the realm of despair. If it is only the nuclear option that we can think of then it is a poor reflection on the resources still left to us.
No, a country of 170 million — although heaven knows our inflated population is nothing to boast about — should have other resources of mind and spirit to rely on. First, we have to set our house in order, which of course is easier said than done. But for starters at least we can curb some of the fascination we have with internal bloodletting. Pakistan presents a picture not so much of a country under external attack as bleeding from within.
Why can’t we get things right? Why can’t we get a grip not so much on our problems as, to begin with, ourselves? Other countries have gone through worse times and the luckier ones have emerged stronger from their troubles. We present a picture of disarray, which is a greater danger than any threat of a blitzkrieg from across our eastern frontier.
We must also refashion our military doctrine, matching not tank for tank but thinking of how smaller countries have stood up to bigger adversaries: Finland standing up to the Red Army in 1940, the Vietnamese holding their own against China in 1979, the Hezbollah stopping the mighty Israeli army in 2006.
The cold start doctrine is unconventional thinking. This is a strange reversal of roles. As the smaller power, the David to India’s Goliath, we should be going down the unusual route.
And, please, a final farewell to ‘jihad’. We have paid a heavy price for this folly. If the kingdom of heaven is to have any meaning it must be created in the here and now. So it may be time to start behaving like a people with a modicum of understanding at their command..
Email: winlust@yahoo.com
Folly, not clash of institutions-Ayaz Amir
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Friday, January 29, 2010
Ayaz Amir
Clash of institutions has a grand ring to it, suggestive of Cromwell’s Roundheads battling the monarchy; or the children of the French Revolution slaughtering the French nobility; or Lenin’s Bolsheviks storming the Winter Palace.
Would that this were the state of affairs in Pakistan. We could then expect something creative, a higher synthesis, to emerge from all this disorder. But we are not that lucky. This is less clash of institutions than elephants on parade: large egos on the march, the vanity of mediocrity on display — dressed up, as Pakistani mediocrity mostly is, in the colours of national salvation.
If Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani is refusing to put a pistol to his head, if he is refusing to become another Farooq Leghari, and if the National Assembly (including the PML-N) is with him on the matter of not committing collective suicide, media samurais — of whom there are not a few and who deserve the title of Ustad-e-Fidayeen better than any Taliban — are dismayed, and almost on the verge of hysteria, because the triumph of prudence is the last thing they wish to celebrate.
For six months and more these laptop warriors have been spreading confusion and alarm, conning a public which they take to be gullible into thinking that political change is around the corner. But their deadlines having not been met, not once but repeatedly, it is not surprising if there is an air of increasing desperation about their battle-cries, which they expect the public to take as serious analysis. If their frantic outpourings are serious analysis, comic relief acquires a different meaning.
Two slogans have proved the most enduring in our history: Islam and corruption. Every humbug in authority, especially when besieged and short of real answers to our many problems, has raised the banner of Islam, none more loudly than Gen Ziaul Haq, who would be prince if ever there was a kingdom dedicated wholesale to the worship of hypocrisy. The more of a mess we have made of our Constitution the greater the reliance on Islamic references — not for acting upon them, perish the thought, as for the sacred rites of lip-service and window-dressing.
To much the same use has been put the slogan of corruption. In every military coup, from Ayub to Musharraf, in every civilian coup, whether carried out by Ghulam Ishaq Khan or Farooq Leghari, the eradication of corruption has figured as the foremost priority. Ironic, then, is it not, that after every forced transition, every turn of the screw, the one thing to explode was corruption? So much for the good intentions, and so much for the heaven they led to.
At present too the idea of change — that change is necessary if Pakistan is to survive — has been hyped up relentlessly around the theme of corruption. Foremost in this campaign, although keeping themselves well hidden in the shadows, have been the self-appointed guardians of our ideological frontiers. They may have been less than adept at guarding our geographical frontiers — the ones visible on a map — but the ramparts of ideology, in their own definition of this term, they continue to guard jealously.
The laptop warriors may be doing their own thing, for in their ranks are to be found the odd knight of good faith genuinely taken in by all the talk about corruption, but the wrecking game they are embarked upon fits in neatly with the agenda of the ideological warriors who are just not comfortable with a civilian dispensation.
Angels from heaven can descend tomorrow and minister to the needs of the Islamic Republic, but the ideological warriors and the definers of strategic depth — one and the same thing — won’t be satisfied. Why do they suffer the Constitution? Why do they endure civilian trappings? If they are so impatient with democracy they should make Myanmar their model and once and for all have done with the charade of democracy.
It is a measure of the success of the forces out to alter the political landscape that in just two years since the revival of democracy, they have managed to instil into the minds of the middle class — which for all its presumed sophistication is the first to fall for such gambits — that Pakistan’s number one problem is corruption. If this bull is caught by the horns salvation is at hand. If not, the Republic faces ruin and destruction.
The lawyers’ movement did much good in that it helped weaken the foundations of dictatorship, although I must hasten to add that by itself it wasn’t strong enough to defeat that dictatorship. That outcome had to await the fruition of the political process as signified by the holding of elections and the assumption of office by a political government. Even so, the lawyers’ movement was an inspiring sight while it lasted. To a nation caught in the throes of depression it gave a glimpse of what resolve and sustained commitment could achieve.
But there have been some negative effects too. One is the outbreak of a species of arrogance amongst lawyers finding vent in violent and yahoo behaviour. The frequency of such outbursts is serving to dim the shine of the lawyers’ movement, the heroes of yesterday allowing themselves to be seen in a poor light. The second is the rise of a strange kind of innocence which seems to be divorced from any understanding of Pakistan’s tempestuous past.
This innocence finds expression in the belief that the movement and the subsequent restoration of the judges were turning points in our history. In this somewhat exalted view of things, the restored judges have been cast in heroic colours, indeed likened to prophets of a new dawn in which justice and the rule of law will always prevail. It was no doubt in a like spirit of exaltation that Justice Jawwad Khawaja in his added note to the detailed judgement of My Lord the Chief Justice in the NRO case stated that the last three years in their momentousness “… can be accorded the same historical significance as the events of 1947… and those of 1971…”
Jinnah was the hero of 1947 and Yahya the anti-hero of 1971. While Musharraf can be made to run a close parallel to Yahya, whom should we take as the Jinnah of the last three years? In any event, this rendering of history can be faulted on another count. On our side of the divide, Jinnah was the sole architect of 1947. Lawyers and judges have not been the sole shapers of the outcome of the last three years. They played a part and often a heroic part in those events but not the sole part.
And it is salutary to remember that the judges did not restore democracy. It was democracy which restored them. As we go on about a new dawn this sequence of events should not be forgotten.
Furthermore, as laptop warriors foam at the mouth and serve up their beliefs and desires as news and analysis, faith that a new dawn is really at hand will be immeasurably strengthened if the guardians of justice take up two pressing challenges: (1) apologise in the clearest of terms, with a due sense of contrition, for the oath taken by them at the altar of Musharraf’s PCO in 2000, and if some amongst their present lordships validated Musharraf’s coup in the Zafar Ali Shah judgment, an apology for that too; and (2) take up instantly Air Marshal Asghar Khan’s petition about the Mehran Bank scandal and the money distributed by the ISI in the 1990 elections.
If there is any hesitation on both or either of these counts — and there can be very understandable reasons for exercising caution — would it be too much to ask that discretion be the better part of valour in other things as well?
The inadequacy of the political class may be great and may be enough to drive one to despair. But if there is one lesson of our history it is that there is no alternative to democracy. It is within its fold and bosom that we must seek its reform and correction, and the salvation of the Pakistani nation.
Email: winlust@yahoo.com
Conscience of the constitution-Ayaz Amir
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Conscience of the constitution
Islamabad diary
Friday, January 22, 2010
Ayaz Amir
The National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO) was a dead duck the moment the National Assembly refused to have anything to do with it. If it still needed another shot in the head, a division bench of the Supreme Court (SC) could have done the needful, no extraordinary issue of constitutional theory being involved in the outcome.
But we have not been that lucky, all 17 of their SC lordships hearing the NRO case whose detailed judgment — written by My Lord the Chief Justice — is now out, and about which the shrillest comments are coming from the already committed or the already biased.
This judgment is not for the fainthearted because it doesn’t make for easy reading. This is not syntax at the point of a rapier; more a sledgehammer driving home its many obvious points.
Discrimination — favouring a certain classification of people, to the exclusion of others — was enough of a touchstone by which to fell the NRO and make short work of it. But in its wisdom — and I readily confess there may be reasons for doing so not readily accessible to untrained legal minds like mine — the SC chose to traverse a longer route, to arrive at much the same conclusion.
In so doing the SC has pointed the way, in part, to a quaint realm of thought. It says the Constitution has a conscience which nothing must violate, a point of view likely to sound strange to the many cynics inhabiting the Republic who are convinced that anything by way of both innocence and conscience the 1973 Constitution lost long ago at the hands of such conscience-keepers as Gen Ziaul Haq.
Zia’s greatest collaborators were superior judges, as were Pervez Musharraf’s when he seized power many years later. It is a sobering thought that all the 17 pillars of wisdom now in the SC took oath under Musharraf’s Provisional Constitutional Order (PCO) in 2000. The Constitution may have had a conscience even then but it wasn’t strong enough to deter baptism in the waters of the PCO.
Nor was this all. Just as earlier coups had been validated by the superior judiciary, Musharraf’s coup was validated too in 2000 in the famous Zafar Ali Shah case. Among the luminaries on that bench headed by Chief Justice Irshad Hasan Khan was an up and coming judge by the name of Iftikhar Chaudhry.
By which I do not mean to say that people remain always the same and do not change. They change all the time. Some of us as we grow old become worse, leaving the idealism of youth behind. Some of us grow better, leaving behind the thoughtlessness or follies of our younger days. But the least that should come with the remembrance of past omissions or mistakes is a measure of humility.
How well has Ghalib put it: Mein ne Majnoon pe lark pan mein Asad, Sang uthaya tau sar yaad aya. When I thought of casting a stone at Majnoon, I thought of my own head — meaning my own follies.
In his note to the detailed judgment written by CJ Chaudhry, Justice Jawwad Khawaja writes as follows: “At the very outset it must be said, without sounding extravagant, that the past three years in the history of Pakistan have been momentous, and can be accorded the same historical significance as the events of 1947 when the country was created and those of 1971 when it was dismembered.” He goes on to say: “It is with this sense of the nation’s past that we find ourselves called upon to understand and play the role envisaged for the Supreme Court by the Constitution.”
Without sounding extravagant? There’s a touch of hubris about this declaration which almost amounts to saying that caught as we are in the midst of great events, it is history which calls upon us to make great decisions. A judiciary best fulfils its functions if it is faithful to the letter of the law and if it is honest in interpreting it; and if it doesn’t play second fiddle to dictators and doesn’t bend the law to suit their purposes. A sense of historical mission, which is what is suggested by Justice Khawaja’s observation, is best left to the people and their chosen representatives.
And if it is history we should consider, it must be history in its entirety and not slices of history susceptible to selective interpretation. Nowhere is the judgment’s take on recent history more evident, and perhaps more startling, than in its analysis of the meaning of the word â€reconciliation’. It says that the NRO was a deal between two individuals — Pervez Musharraf and Benazir Bhutto — for their personal objectives.
“We are of the opinion,” says the judgment, “that the NRO was not promulgated for â€national reconciliation’ but for achieving the objectives which absolutely have no nexus with the (sic) â€national reconciliation’ because the nation of Pakistan, as a whole, has not derived any benefit from the same.”
In attesting to the subjective nature of the NRO, the judgment quotes this from Benazir Bhutto’s book, Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West: “The talks with Musharraf remained erratic. He didn’t want us resigning from the assemblies when he sought re-election. There wouldn’t be much difference in his winning whether we boycotted or contested, but we used this to press him to retire as army chief. He cited judicial difficulties. It was a harrowing period. After many, many late-night calls, he passed a National Reconciliation Order, rather than lift the ban on a twice-elected prime minister seeking office a third time, which he said he would do later.”
Is this an individual talking or a major political leader discussing the when and how of a democratic transition? The keystone, the flagstone, of Musharraf’s rule was his position as army chief. And here when Benazir Bhutto is negotiating the removal of Musharraf’s uniform — in which she eventually succeeded — their lordships are of the opinion that this deal between the two was just confined to their two selves and had no wider significance whatsoever.
This is a selective reading of the past three years which in Justice Khawaja’s estimation have been as momentous as anything in our past. There were many things which came together to pave the way for the transition from Musharraf to the present order. Different chapters were written by different authors.
The lawyers’ movement wrote one chapter, arguably the most important in weakening the mainstays of the Musharraf dispensation. CJ Iftikhar Chaudhry and the judges who stood with him wrote another chapter when they defied Musharraf. This was a first in Pakistani history. Judges had been collaborators of military strongmen. They had never stood up to them before, at least not in this manner.
There was a third chapter written by Benazir Bhutto and, much as we may dislike the notion, by our American friends when in tandem they prevailed upon Musharraf to shed his uniform. The judiciary and the lawyers’ movement had an indirect hand in this in that they had created the climate in which Musharraf had become an enfeebled ruler. But this should not detract from Benazir Bhutto’s role who played her cards shrewdly and engaged with Musharraf in a manner which persuaded him to hand over the army baton to a successor.
The fourth chapter was written in Benazir Bhutto’s blood when she was assassinated in Liaquat Bagh. The lawyers and the judiciary had weakened Musharraf. They hadn’t destroyed him. Benazir Bhutto’s death rocked the Musharraf order by bringing the latent anger of the people to the surface. There was nothing that could save Musharraf thereafter, Benazir Bhutto proving more powerful in death than she had been in life.
And it was only with the coming of democracy that the judges detained by Musharraf were freed. And only with the so-called long march led by Nawaz Sharif that, after many travails, they were eventually restored. In other words, it was the political process and the climate of the times which led to their historic restoration. How can their lordships see themselves in isolation from all this history?
The NRO was a bad law and there can be no cavil with this. But it was part of a larger picture of which there is scarce a mention in the entire judgment.
Email: winlust@yahoo.com
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