Reporting Pakistan
Page 28
The trial gave a glimpse of a civilian triumph, momentarily. Though I did cover it till I left, it was muddled in procedure, and it was pretty much not going anywhere. The Supreme Court also dismissed a review petition challenging its earlier order which held that Musharraf’s proclamation of Emergency on 3 November 2007 was unconstitutional and void, and which declared him a usurper of power. A full fourteen-member bench of the apex court headed by Chief Justice Tassaduq Hussain Jillani heard the case for three days before deciding to turn down the petition on the grounds that it was time-barred and should have been filed within thirty days of the order on 31 July 2009. The court found no merit in the case and repeatedly ticked off the lawyers representing Musharraf for producing irrelevant arguments. The Supreme Court had in July 2009 already declared Musharraf’s decision on 3 November 2007 to impose Emergency as unconstitutional and illegal.
While the government on the face of it looked determined to prosecute Musharraf, his lawyers spoke of a safe passage offered to him even before the trial started. Then there were reports of him being asked to sign an apology by the government which offered to fly in his mother, but was not going to let him out. It came as no surprise that eventually Musharraf went to Dubai in March 2016, promising to return and face the charges, after the apex court struck down his travel ban. Justice Faisal Arab was moved up to the Supreme Court and the trial was moving in a desultory fashion. The limits of civilian rule were clearly set.
Army gets a new chief
The dapper, chain-smoking General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani steered the Pakistan Army for six years after an extension was given to him in 2010 by the then prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, but he was unlikely to get another one. He witnessed the country’s first democratic transition and would be remembered for his statements aimed at keeping the army out of the government’s hair. Speculation was rife about a post-retirement job but it didn’t materialize. In an unusual statement before his retirement on 29 November 2013, he quashed rumours of a new post being created for him. Old soldiers never die, they just fade away, a popular refrain from an old barrack-room ballad—while Kayani may not fade into oblivion he was certainly retiring. Keeping in line with his approach as chief of army staff, where he did not favour interference in the government, his statement clearly indicated the army’s support for democracy and civilian institutions. The armed forces of Pakistan fully support and want to strengthen this democratic order, Kayani said. He also stated that the government and the army were on the same page on the question of talks with the TTP and he refuted talk that he favoured a dialogue since army operations had failed to root out terrorism. His retirement came some months after the incident on the LoC when five Indians were beheaded by men dressed in Pakistan Army uniforms. The controversy did not die down for a long time and it was a setback to the already-strained relations after 26/11. While Pakistan has been offering a joint investigation, India has not accepted it and maintains that the five soldiers were killed in August by the Pakistan Army. Pakistan has denied this often enough and Sartaj Aziz while meeting the former Indian high commissioner, stated that the Indian media’s ‘overreaction’ to the LoC incident had also not helped.1
When Kayani retired after forty-four years of service, he regretted2 what he described as ‘unfortunate, unfounded and provocative’ some statements by the Indian military leadership, particularly the Indian Army chief alleging that the Pakistan Army and the ISI were supporting terrorism. He had backed Prime Minister Sharif’s peace overtures to India and said the Pakistan Army was fully supportive of the peace process initiated by the government. He had also said India would be well advised to respond positively to Pakistan’s suggestion for holding a joint or impartial investigation into the LoC incidents, preferably by the United Nations.
In 1998 as prime minister, Sharif had chosen General Musharraf, thereby overriding the principle of seniority, and there was speculation that he was not likely to repeat the same mistake. However, Lieutenant General Raheel Sharif, the next chief, superseded two others in rank. We had to clarify in news reports that he wasn’t related to the prime minister. General Raheel Sharif, who was principal staff officer to General Kayani, had three years to go before retirement when he took over as chief in November 2013. This was big news and The Hindu carried the story on the front page. The new chief came from a traditional military family and was decorated with the Hilal-e-Imtiaz, and is the younger brother of the 1971 war hero Major Shabbir Sharif who was awarded the Nishan-e-Haider. Soon after General Raheel Sharif took over, he visited the headquarters of the Special Service Group (SSG) at Ghazi Base, Tarbela, creating a needless controversy. The fact that Musharraf belonged to this elite cadre and was being tried for treason was not lost on anyone. The visit was probably to underscore the importance of the army and the SSG and also assert the authority of the army at a time when democratic forces were seeking to punish a military dictator. The senior-most army officer Lt. Gen. Haroon Aslam, who was superseded by two of his juniors, tendered his resignation. He was an SSG commando like Musharraf, and the director general of military operations in 1999 when PM Sharif was ousted in a military coup; Sharif could not have had happy memories of another SSG commando who staged that coup, or being under arrest along with his Cabinet.
Apart from creating a security state and ruling Pakistan for most of the time since Partition, the army in the country is flush with funds. It has many tentacles in business, real estate and aviation, as Ayesha Siddiqa has pointed out in her book, Military Inc.3 Milbus, or ‘military capital that is used for personal benefit’, is a fact of life and army personnel own large tracts of land and are entitled to decent housing and plots. The military way of life and thinking, to put it mildly, looks down on politicians who are perceived as ineffective and corrupt. While General Kayani may have made the right noises on the ground on enmity with India, he is perceived to be hawkish and things don’t seem to have changed much. The threat from terrorism and the enemy within are something the army has to contend with as seriously, if not more so, than the hostility from India. After the Turkish coup in July 2016 that failed to overthrow President Tayyip Erdogan, Imran Khan said that the people of Pakistan would celebrate and distribute sweets if the army takes over.4 He was scathing about the ‘monarchy’ of Nawaz Sharif who had further sunk the country into debt. Imran backs the Taliban and calls for peace talks; he backs the army and protests against Sharif. If nothing else, Imran Khan is probably trying to pave his way as Sharif’s successor in the next general elections. He seems to have the right credentials. The question, as always, is: can democracy succeed without toeing the military agenda?
8
Reviving a Left-of-centre Politics and Other Stories
It was not only terror, trade or Indo-Pak relations, but other aspects of Pakistan that I wrote about. The left parties were regrouping, only a section of the Left particularly, it was pointed out to me, which was an important development. Whether such a move would leave any long-lasting impression on the political theatre is a big question mark but for those who want to explore a non-neo-liberal, non-right wing option, the Left is there in whatever form. Once strong in the North-West Frontier Province (now KPK), they were ruthlessly exterminated by the Taliban, with the Awami National Party becoming the main sufferer as 500 of its workers, some say, were killed. Does the Left in any form have a future in Pakistan? The ban on student unions has meant that there is no campus politics or elections, and there are councils or religious groupings which have injected a strong dose of fundamentalism. There is a battle between the East and the West on campus; while on the one hand, students struggle for recognition for their organizations, on the other, there is alarm over the power they can wield if allowed the freedom to organize. The other stories in this chapter deal with the Afghan refugees, a sore point in Pakistan with what it calls a ‘host fatigue’ setting in though 2016 saw a record number of returning Afghans which human rights groups feel is a result of Pakistan forcing them to leave.
A Left revival of sorts
Imagine a trade union in a military unit in Pakistan. Yet that was one of the first unions that Abid Hassan Minto formed when he joined the Communist Party in Pakistan in 1949. It was a workers’ association at the Military Engineering Service; the other one was in a multinational oil company at Attock. Such a thing would be unthinkable now, grinned Minto, the president of the Awami Workers Party (AWP), which was formed after a merger of three parties in 2012 (Labour, Awami and Workers’ parties). There was a buzz about the new unity of the left parties then. This was a renewed attempt to forge a clearly defined Left in Pakistan, said Minto, a sprightly eighty in 2013 when I met him.
The Communist Party was scattered after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, as also due to the resurgence of the global corporate system in the shape of the New World. The disarray of the Left was everywhere, and in Pakistan, the trade union movement was weak and it splintered into many factions. The grouping of parties was based on individuals. For Minto, the key question was what kind of politics the Left had to come up with to deal with new challenges in Pakistan where many things hadn’t changed at all.
An opportunity to meet some leftists came up when the Progressive Writers Association (PWA) organized a meeting with communist ideologue Sajjad Zaheer’s daughter, Noor Zaheer, who had come from New Delhi to speak about her books. The red-brick building with a small hall was the venue for her speech and when I landed there, my spooks, Beard and a new guy, were there too, and during a break I saw them questioning the organizers. They stayed till tea and when I tried to find my way out of the hall and mistakenly took the wrong staircase, one of them, not Beard, followed me and I asked him to show me the way out. He asked me, cheekily, ‘To India?’
But I was glad I had gone there. I met many progressive writers. There was plenty of nostalgia and Noor Zaheer was warmly received. People called her Comrade Noor, in memory of her late father who headed the Communist Party of Pakistan before it was banned in 1954.
I met her early in the morning at the PWA guest house over tea. Zaheer said what was most needed was for splinter groups not only in Pakistan but all over South Asia to come together and challenge the religious and other right-wing forces. Her father had left behind a legacy which should be taken forward and a lot is left to be done. The Left is also seeking a distinct identity from the liberals who hail from a class not interested in social change, according to Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, the secretary general of the AWP, Punjab. He is clear that activism alone won’t help consolidate or add up to a coherent movement. Something beyond activism needs to happen and that was one of the aims of trying to bring all the Left groups together.
The Pakistan Communist Party was formed in 1948 by Sajjad Zaheer, Sibte Hasan and Ashfaq Beg after the Calcutta Congress when it was decided to have a separate party, but even at its height it had only 650 or so members—the card holders. The numbers were small but the politics was clear: they were committed to Marxism as a gospel.1 As soon as the party was banned, since there was no real centre to it, it started breaking up. The deterioration was at the intellectual level—Minto explained there was ideological confusion which took away the commitment, and in Pakistan the party was young. He felt that now it was difficult to bring back that faith.
Minto didn’t live in Islamabad and I had to count on the days he visited. But I could make headway thanks to the PWA where I met a few people who were knowledgeable about the Communist Party such as it was in Pakistan. I met Minto at a guest house in Islamabad and he was very forthcoming. He wondered why I took so many notes. ‘Are you doing a PhD?’ he asked me. But it was a fascinating story and Minto was involved politically in other areas as well and was full of anecdotes.
For the AWP, the challenge is mainly to create an alternative to the neo-liberal economic system. Opting for a social democratic method is the only way out. For the three parties in the merger, Minto said there is no choice but to revert to the principles enunciated in Left/Marxist politics and they have to adapt to the changing situation. Departing from the earlier internationalist politics that split the communists between China and the Soviets, the new party decided to stick to anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism in some manner, and formulate a joint programme based on Marxist principles. While peasant communities organized in the mid-20th century, and there were some reforms, the ban in 1954 of the Communist Party and its affiliated unions put an end to further struggles. The Left was more of a talking and debating group than a political group, Minto said caustically. There is uncertainty as to whether the Left in a classical fashion will be able to tackle neo-liberal politics. There is an understanding that it needs a new identity which forges links with anti-Taliban and anti-fundamentalist forces. Minto is realistic about the need for a left-of-centre politics.
In the past, the Left had its student, peasant and trade union federations plus the PWA. The AWP feels there is a critical mass for the Left to grow in Pakistan and this could be due to the joint impact of Taliban terror and the onslaught of the middle classes coming up as the partner of the political system. But in this whole mass of civil society, Minto’s question is: ‘How many want a new politics?’
There are other challenges. Can the AWP take all the principal left groups in Pakistan along? From only talking, it has to work with the peasantry and the working classes, and the methods can be different, but there has to be a commitment to the programme, he said. The idea then would be to put the Left under one political banner and have an anti-feudal, democratic and anti-imperialist stand in the sense that Pakistan should not be governed by the international neo-liberal economy.
The communist forces in Pakistan have been fragmented by international politics and dissensions within, and support of the powers that be, including military dictators. Critics like Fayyaz Baqir, who was in left student politics in the 1960s, point out that the strength of the communists had been in their strong literary and artistic agenda. Now director of the Akhter Hameed Khan Resource Centre, he said that right from the beginning, the serious shortcoming which persists till today, is that they have no understanding of Pakistan society. The communists didn’t produce mass leaders, nor did they throw up non-traditional intellectuals or original research, he said. They were divided between the Soviet and the Chinese camps, and they made no analysis of the class structures or class interests, not to speak of the way the state or the political system worked in Pakistan. They didn’t have an understanding of mass politics, and as a
result, when the PPP was formed with many elements from the Left, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto captured power. The Left lacked an understanding of religion and so it couldn’t blame the problems only on religious leaders.
The hopelessness is edged with a silver lining. The younger cadre is dedicated, though it is difficult to get students involved in politics. Aasim Sajjad Akhtar got into the left movement by accident, through the study circle route, but that old assembly line, along with the banned student unions, had stopped producing results. While left mainstream politics was a force in other countries, that was not the case in Pakistan. The internal weaknesses came to the fore and there was total collapse; most of the old leadership left the party and the organizational capacity was eroded. The people who stayed on were very junior and they were pushed to the top. There’s a lot of dynamism, he said, but no real regeneration in terms of a cadre of younger activists. It will, he said, take a long time to build a cadre to replace the old one.
On the bright side, Akhtar said, there’s a lot of impetus coming from the younger cadre which doesn’t have the baggage of the Cold War demons. The party also has to find new spaces to work. It is already working with squatters; it’s associated with the movement in Okara where the farmers continue to occupy the land grabbed by the army. It’s a movement that broke the taboo, especially in the Punjab, where the military is sacrosanct.
He pointed out that you cannot lay claim to an ideology because you own it, you have to build on it; trade unions now are pocket unions. It’s about maintaining roots, the ability to be involved and in touch with movements which emerge, while also focusing on building a critical mass, he said. ‘The Left is sorely needed for a third perspective. Ideologically, the society shifted to the right, no one is talking of class, gender or social cleavages in society . . . It will take time to make the changes.’ I don’t know if Minto was questioned by the spooks, but both Baqir and Akhtar had ‘visitors’ after I left. While Baqir invited them inside and patiently answered their questions, Akhtar gave them an earful.