Rumour afloat is that Yousuf Raza Gilani of PPP would be the next prime minister of Pakistan. Okay, what’s next? Here is the fun part!, next..sigh…He would be dethroned in three months time. In the meantime Asif Ali Zardari whose name has certain postfixes glued with it permanently now, will contest a by-election and eventually become the leader of the house in National Assembly a.k.a Prime Minister of Pakistan.
The history of disposable prime ministers in Pakistan stretches back the turbulent 50’s era. When Chaudhray Muhammad Ali, Muhammad Ali Bogra, Sir Firoz Khan Noon and Ibrahim Ismael Chandrigar played the prime ministerial musical chairs in a succession of less that 18 months. Everybody played to the tunes of the then dictators namely Ghulam Muhammad and Iskandar Mirza, who happened to be the Governor Generals. In the later part, post 1958, the dictators removed the word Governor from the Governor General and since then Generals remained the life line of dictatorships in Pakistan.
Not long ago, this act was repeated during the era of our moderate general, the one and only of its kind, General Syed Parvez Musharraf. He appointed a simpleton Zafrullah Jamali as prime minister which Jamali thought as a divine gift and attributed it to some of the famous mystic shrines in Sindh which he held in great reverence. He also started calling Musharraf as his boss. But as with the royal minds, somehow this former president of Pakistan Hockey Federation, fell from the grace of the generals eye and he was packed back to his small town in Baluchistan. Then the anchor person of the PML(Q) Chaudhry Shujaat Husssain was invited to form his cabinet for a period of 45 days. This act coined a new term in Pakistani parliamentary history and he became famous as ‘Halala’ prime minister. And later, Citi Bank executive Shaukat Aziz was installed as PM. Shuakat Aziz to the Pakistani public was as the IMF to the Third World countries. Also his raison d’etre was that he didn’t have any political background and thus was less potent.
Now when the initial euphoria of the February 18th elections is subsiding. The ugly realities of power play are becoming more apparent. For reasons, unknown so far, Makhdoom Amin Fahim has been sidelined. And Zardari has apparently picked his disposable prime minister which would be replaced by none other than Asif Ali Zardari himself.
I think it would be more pertinent if we look at the corruption allegation over Mr Zardari in the right perspective and in this regard I believe that our establishment is in habit of systematically inducing a venom to the general public against the politicians. And this has worked well. The result is that if we look at the existing lot of politicians from any party, the general public has become cynical about them over some of the facts and more of the fiction around the corruption tales. They simply call every politician as corrupt without getting into the very basics of legal understanding.
Having said so, I never thought of politicians as pious people. To become politician you need to be shrewd, deceitful, aggressive, power player, ambitious and above all hypocrite. These are the fundamentals of power play. However, this also makes you the almost complete human being of any society. A person who can grab votes from Haji, Nimazi, Jawari, Sharabi, gentleman and goon at the same time, must be a smart person. But their is one thing, if the politician loves his/her country and his intentions about the overall well being of the public are good, I think he/she deserves power.
Lets get to Mr Zardari. First of all, apparently he seems a very average person. But is defamation campaign was so intense that even the PPP’s own people believe in his corruption. And that was the reason Benazir Bhutto kept him out of scene and also because he is a heart patient. Now circumstances have focused the spot light on this person. Lets give devil his due. If you wipe out this person from the current political scene, what do you see? A party in tatters. Every PPP person from the second cadre of leadership believes himself just as right a candidate as any other of his peers, for the country’s top office. Due to kinship ( or whatever factor you may name it ) this person is at least consensus candidate for the winning party. Fortunately or unfortunately, over the 40 years history of PPP, spending time in prison has become an unmatched qualification to be recognised as a true jiyala and Makhdoom Amin Fahim lacks it. I don’t count the politically motivated corruption cases against any individual as his/her disqualification.
Lastly, what we should do? What other options we have ? If we don’t have any Nelson Mandela or Winston Churchill among our leadership then we have to work with the available lot. As long as the Nawaz-Zardari duo don’t turn their back on the core issues which Pakistan is facing today, we should be supporting their intentions. And as for as corruption is concerned, almost every political leadership in any country of the world stinks. And also I wouldn’t worry about his past as a 10 or 30 percent guy because even if he was doing any corruption it was from a very small segment of Pakistani annual revenue pie. Pakistani budget goes like this: 50% Debt Management, 30% defence and 20% for the rest of the entire country. And thus, there are other sacred cows as well, which are still grazing but you cannot talk about it.
