I PROMISED last week that I would continue until I reached the present. I discussed the many anomalies that faced Pakistan before and after birth and about which all we have done is to bury our heads deeper into the sand. I am writing this in a city called Zhanjiang in Guangdong province in China, so I have to rely on memory because I don't have my reference books with me, but if I recall correctly, Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah said that the Governor General should be head of state and head of government. Now there's another anomaly for you, because he would have known better than anyone that the British parliamentary system is meant for a unitary state, while Pakistan is a federation that needs the presidential system with its vital separation of legislature from executive. Was he talking of a French-type system, which is what we had de facto from 2002 to 2007? If so, what stopped him from coming out with it clearly? Either way, the fact remains that our founding fathers left us without any clear and definitive document enunciating either our ideology or the political system we were to have, thus leaving the door open to all sort of interpreters, contenders, pretenders and charlatans of the feudal-tribal and of the obscurant kind, none of whom had lifted a finger for the creation of Pakistan. The first thing we did after ‘New Pakistan' was something incredible: We used the excuse of there being no basic law to make Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto the first ever civilian chief martial law administrator, though by rights he should have been leader of the opposition. Then we went and willfully made the same mistake at the advent of the ‘New Pakistan' that we had with the ‘Old Pakistan': We didn't hold fresh elections in the new state and ended up with the same anomaly as in 1947 - the minority of the members elected to the Constituent Assembly in one country making a constitution in another. Talk about learning from history. It was another partition. The “logic” that the remaining MPs represented the majority of what was left of Pakistan can be highly destructive. What is to stop Altaf Hussain from taking a cue from Z.A. Bhutto and demanding that since the MQM has a majority in Karachi there should be two constitutions and two prime ministers, one set each for Karachi and for the rest for Pakistan? This can become endless. From the ridiculous to the comical, what is to stop me from declaring my house an independent state on the ground that I am the most popular person within its four walls? Comical? Did not two lost clerics declare the Red Mosque an independent Islamic state under Shariah law? Didn't Baitullah Mehsud do the same in Swat? This is a cancer eating away at our vitals that cannot be regressed by force, negotiations, homilies or nostrums alone. Not until we begin to address our anomalies from our genesis onwards. In changing to his presidential system in 1977 Bhutto would have created another anomaly. Now hold on to your seats because Bhutto was another intelligent and educated man who would have known better. He wanted a presidential system in a unitary state! He had a new constitution for a presidential system prepared by Professor Leslie Wolf-Phillips of the LSE in which the whole of Pakistan was lumped back into one unit, without provinces, when the need is for even more provinces. Had he succeeded, we would have moved from anomaly to anomaly: From a parliamentary system in a federation that needs a presidential system to a presidential system in a unitary state that needs a parliamentary system! It's quite incredible. Bhutto was trying to become a dictator. Which highlights yet another anomaly: Our democrats try and become dictators when they can help it while our dictators try to become democrats. Both make a mess because neither do the job that they get into power to do. Nawaz Sharif tried to repeat this when he had a two-thirds majority. Came 1977 and came General Zia. Some believe the CIA engineered the riots to get rid of Bhutto for the nuclear program. If so, why did America look the other way during the Afghan Jihad and allow our nuclear program to come to fruition? But if it's true, it brings up yet another anomaly: Why do our leaders start doing the CIA's dirty work with such alacrity? Bhutto had mutilated his own constitution. Zia mutilated it further and our demography and social fabric too. Fighting ‘Charlie Wilson's War' was fine, but why did Zia look the other way while drugs and lethal weapons were invading our country and Afghan refugees were spreading unhindered throughout Pakistan? There is enough evidence that America part-finances such wars with drug money, like it did in Indo-China and Latin America. But it can only do so if the host country lets it. I am not being naive. I know America's power. But saying no to it is not going to be the end of the world, as some countries have found. Don't you suspect that it is because our rulers of every ilk also get to benefit from such perfidy? Why do we expect those to care for Pakistan whose affiliations change for a few pieces of silver or a few more years or another stint in power? Zia's 8th constitutional amendment may initially have come by diktat, but the 1985 parliament, party-less as it was, passed it into the constitution. It needn't have done. Genuine people's representatives don't get swayed by a dictator holding a catapult. What is the worst that could have happened? Parliament dissolved? It finally was and look what happened to Zia. They did it again in 2002 with the 17th amendment, good or bad is not the issue. They didn't have to if they didn't like it. Protestations that it was to get the “democratic process” going again are just fluff. It's simply that they lust after power just as much as any military ruler does. The anomaly is that our politicians don't really understand the essence of democracy. Which throws up another anomaly: More democratic steps have been taken under so-called dictators than under so-called democrats, like Pervez Musharraf spreading the private electronic media, holding local government elections, assemblies completing their terms and governments being changed through elections for the first time. No “democratic” government ever did this. Look at the behavior of our elected rulers during the last “democracy” decade. No assembly, national or provincial, completed its term while every president was a civilian. Governments were characterized by nepotism, self-aggrandizement, megalomania, cronyism, incompetence, revenge, a near total absence of governance and “democrats” in opposition begging the army to intervene. When it did every “democrat” welcomed it, except, of course, the “democrats” that lost power. Democrats forsooth. These guys can only run small princely courts. This brings me to another huge anomaly: As long we are mired in our tendency for dynastic rule (for that was the system that was natural to us before colonization), which by its very nature is undemocratic, these are the sorts of “democratic” dynasts we will get. Look at the record. The only candidate that the combined opposition could field against Ayub Khan in 1964 was Fatima Jinnah. Why? Because the only credentials of this old, non-political lady were that she was Jinnah's sister! Ayub's son was reputed to be his heir-apparent. He did become a member of parliament, speaker and minister, as did Ayub's grandson. So did Zia's son. Bhutto was succeeded by his daughter, though there was the normal dynastic power tussle between mother and daughter for a time and a bigger tussle between her and her brother. She gets killed and this party that calls itself the only liberal and national party slavishly selects her 19-year old son to replace her, with regent none other than his father. And though there is nothing technically wrong in it, because the son is descended through the female line (which is more important in Western monarchies), his surname was changed to his maternal grandfather's to give him greater political ‘legitimacy', what with the children through the male line waiting in the wings. And we perennially have any number of progeny of dead, clapped out, disqualified or disgraced MPs making it to parliament. Please get me right: I am neither being critical nor making fun. I am only pointing out our many unaddressed anomalies that have led to our present predicament. We all are victims (and sometimes beneficiaries) of our birth and our circumstances. That it is the same in the rest of South Asia doesn't help us. But I ask: Would any of these ladies and gentlemen ever have made it if they had not been somehow related to some original ruler, like the relatives of the original conquerors of old? All this largely explains why we hark back to the past rather than look to the future. On the face of it, it might seem that we are a society in stagnation, hankering after the past, but actually we are a people searching for our roots to understand our genesis. The day we do, we will finally be able to move into the future. __
