Of empowerment

One fine morning in the early days of Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s rule, I found myself in the company of family elders where, Nizam Din, tenant of our small land-holding, had been summoned for the usual seasonal cropping instructions.

When he arrived, and to the utter surprise of everyone, he plonked himself on an empty ‘moora’ (a locally made choir chair) placed in front, instead of squatting on the floor as had been the case for years. “How dare you?” someone yelled, but Nizam gently announced that he had been elevated from ground to eye level by Bhutto.

While it wasn’t quite the moment in Charles Dickens’ ‘Oliver Twist’, where a pure-heated orphan asks for some more gruel which stuns the parish beadle, but nonetheless an important one in an attempt to engineer a social change in Pakistan. Apparently, we had missed a speech given by the Quaid-e-Awam in some public rally, where he had empowered the peasants and declared that land belonged to whoever tilled it – or words to that effect.

The above came to mind after watching the recently aired expensive TV advertisements where Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’s (PTI) intra-party elections had thrown up ordinary handymen like a painter and a carpenter to occupy local offices. Commenting on the ads, a friend who is deeply interested in politics remarked, “If this phenomenon gets viral, we are done as a political tribe”. The advertisement campaign eventually steamed off but not before the virus of empowerment had passed on to returning officers (ROs), and of course for good reasons too as we can see.

One of the first positive steps taken by the previous government on assuming power was to sign and ratify the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which commits nation states to honour the rights of citizens for their physical integrity. But in practice, it showed little concern towards this universal commitment, as innocent citizens kept falling victim to targeted killings and terrorism across the land without let or reprieve in a constantly deteriorating law and order situation.

The safety of its citizens is the first duty of our state but in its twisted view, it allowed political parties in Karachi to maintain professional target killers in their cadre, despite court orders to the contrary. It is out of such indifference that the likes of Ajmal Pahari roam free without a trial even after confessing to over a hundred murders.

Put another way, the state sent its people to their deaths at the altar of expediency so that the government could stay in power. The government stirred only when its own existence was in danger, as in the case of the protest by the Hazara community in Quetta or when there was a grave danger of bloodshed in D Square in Islamabad during Dr Qadri’s long march – a prospect which could well have engulfed it in its flames.

In most countries, there is an established mechanism for citizens to vent their pent-up feelings through such safety valves as peaceful protests or collecting certain volumes of signatures, which then renders a formal response by the government mandatory. Not in Pakistan, it would seem, as thousands of people kept up their street protests in the sweltering heat every summer all these five years.

In parliament, nobodies of yesterday quickly changed from ethnic wear to suave suits and regularly spent quality time abroad – all in the name of democracy. The discontent amongst the people due to power outages, massive corruption, rising inflation, and non-compliance with court judgements, only occasionally evoked some eyewash response but the system largely remained non-responsive to public grievances and was perceived as rotten to the core.
The previous law minister stated on the floor of the House that the Supreme Court had taken suo motu notice 84 times during the last five years. He may well have been trying to see only one side of the coin – that of judicial activism and with a touch of sarcasm – but it didn’t occur to him that if there had been some level of good governance in the first place, or if the opposition had stood up for public interest issues in parliament instead of acting like lambs, waiting for their turn to rule, there would have been no need for activism on the part of the judiciary.

For the public there was no democracy these last five years – it was repression, pure and simple. It is mostly a known characteristic of politicians that it is impossible for them to organise their social hierarchy without some form of repression, but if the rulers make a complete banana republic out of the country, then at some stage the people can be expected to say: enough is enough. The run-up to Elections 2013 is perhaps just that tipping point.

Resultantly, the chief justice’s reminder to the ROs about their responsibilities in the task at hand brought out the latent empowerment which their predecessors always had but felt drained out of energy when faced with influential factotums accompanied by platoons of supporters.

The freshly empowered ROs, imbued with unbridled enthusiasm in some cases, suddenly found it possible and even holy to adjudge who was and was not ‘sadiq and ameen’ under Articles 62 and 63 of the constitution.
There are lacunas of course like in some parts of Pakistan, people are aware of their right and repose trust in ‘light’. They believe that ‘darkness’ is not a force but only an absence of light and are standing up for righteousness. Across huge swathes of Pakistan, however, millions of people sunk in abject poverty and bondage of feudalism, think otherwise.

To elucidate, President Asif Ali Zardari is accused of stashing billions abroad and he thinks nothing of any promises made. Yet, if he were to submit his nomination papers in interior Sindh for this election, it is highly unlikely that it would be rejected on the touchstone of ‘sadiq and ameen’.
And the ROs who asked candidates to recite six kalmas would have done better to realise that many of those who can recite them all in a single breath and much more, are the same people who are tearing Pakistan apart on a daily basis.

Our society needs to detoxify from the effects of religious overdose from Zia’s era. But, lest we make a mistake, this detoxification alone is not the answer to our predicament. The moderate majority, which has failed so far, also has to check its slide towards decadence and deliver.
Switching back to the story of Nizam Din, who returned possession of the land after years of legal battle lasting long after Bhutto’s death.
Today, he is an old man who survives on a piece of land, barely enough for subsistence and given by the same elders. He is allowed to keep it out of family traditions of deference for gestures made by the deceased, acrimony of the past notwithstanding. He now smiles at the promises made by yet another successor of Chairman Bhutto.

By and large, the Election Commission has done a good job so far which amply reflects public aspirations for a better future government.
The challenge, however, is to achieve a settlement that fulfils our needs to send in the right kind of people in the next parliament and yet not come out as a bruised society out of this exercise. Empowerment, we would do well to remember, has a short lifespan in Pakistan while some in the electoral machinery may have a full life ahead of them.
The writer is a retired vice-admiral. Email: tajkhattak@ymail.com