Politics for profit
A FRENZY of activity marked the final moments of the Sindh government’s tenure with signs of frayed nerves visible in the Chief Minister’s House and elsewhere. What did it indicate?
A picture pieced together by conversations with a number of politicians and officials present at the Chief Minister’s House at one point or the other in those final hours, underlined the distance the PPP has journeyed from its ideological moorings.
The few ideological lines that remained to be crossed during the lifetime of Ms Benazir Bhutto were also obliterated and, it seemed, politics was no more about serving the electorate and all about corporate-type greed with not a ‘regulator’ in sight.
A year or more into the PPP government’s 1988 term in office, I was working as a reporter in the monthly Herald magazine and looking at the performance of the incumbents. An old-school PPP MPA came to our cramped reporters’ room at my invitation to offer his thoughts.
Responding to my question of whether all the corruption stories were true, he said, “Masla ye he ke humain paanch din kaa Test match khelne ko mila hai. Lekin humare bohot saare dost one-day ke aakhree over ki tarah khel rahe hein. Har gaind pe balla ghuma dete hein.” (We have been asked to play a five-day Test match but the problem is many of our friends are playing like they would in the final over of a one-day match, swinging wildly at every ball.)
Although this cricketing analogy had me in stitches, it became embedded in my mind.
The final days of the just ended tenure of the Sindh government makes this description even more poignant but not surprising. How could the last moments have been different from the five years during which lawlessness in Karachi or developments in interior Sindh got so little attention?
The Sindh chief minister was made to sign an endless number of papers put before him by ministers and legislators, but the most surely by those acting on behalf of the man who is said to wield the real power in Sindh, the adoptive brother of the president, one Owais Muzaffar Tappi.
At one point, the hapless Qaim Ali Shah is reported to have been so harassed that he stormed out of his office saying he had had it. Only, of course, to return soon after to resume his signing frenzy before the hourglass emptied totally.
Some of the summaries he was made to sign, a witness said, he probably hadn’t even read. Otherwise, given the interest the activist Supreme Court has taken in PPP decisions, he would have thought better.
If some civil servants, perhaps with self-preservation foremost on their minds, hadn’t dragged their feet over these “outrageous” matters, the apex court would have surely hauled over the coals the chief minister and all others involved.
It is already in the public domain how some influential ministers wanted last-minute illegal appointment orders passed and even allegedly roughed up the civil servants; others reportedly wanted criminals released as they needed their help in the elections.
When all these instances were related to a friend, who happens to be close to the current PPP hierarchy, he was very open about party strategy. “Look, we tried ‘ideology’ in the 1970s and to an extent even in the 1980s. Where did it get us?”
“To implement our programme we need to be in power. And all the issues you raise including the winning over of the electables regardless of the means are in aid of that end. Otherwise, we can sit in our homes in embrace of ideology.”
Is the irony of that statement lost on anyone? Seeing the narrow, intolerant brand of Islam gaining ground in the country, can you count how many times you have heard the phenomenon described as Gen Ziaul Haq’s all-enduring legacy?
He sowed the seeds of this intolerance and our generations will have to live with the consequences. But the success of Zia’s ideology has only been made possible by the success of the political system he crafted and the abject abandonment of a counter-ideology.
Having realised the consequences of allowing “party-based” elections as early as the 1979 local bodies polls when, despite all obstacles, an “ideologically driven” PPP performed rather well, Zia committed himself to creating an alternative political narrative.
This was based on identifying people of “potential and talent”, then nurturing them as junior partners in power and enabling them to fill their war chests with infinite state patronage. The set-up that came to be after the party-less elections in 1985 was a result of this.
By the time Zia’s carefully crafted system collapsed because he couldn’t even share minimal power with the civilians and he died in a plane crash in 1988, the PPP felt it was on a steep learning curve.
For Ms Bhutto, her father’s politics still had some resonance and relevance. After her death, the new PPP leadership embraced Zia’s core principle ie all avenues of capturing power were legitimate and must be travelled down on.
Whether measures such as the well-received Benazir Income Support Programme is indicative of a hangover from the “roti, kapra, makaan” days or merely seen as bringing a new dedicated voter into the net isn’t clear.
As it heads towards another election, the one question the party leadership ought to ask itself is that given its abysmal governance record of the past five years, why would a significant number of voters still vote for it.
Has the party done enough to make the ideological worker buy into a corporate party which operates on a profit no matter on what basis? And is that going to be the PPP’s only claim to fame in the coming days and years?
If at all the PPP has reached this conclusion, it must also realise it’ll be up against other players far more adept at playing the corporate game and with a far better delivery record than the PPP.
The writer is a former editor of Dawn.