Daily Times

Weatherwise this is the best time of the year in Lahore. An early October rain has ended the heat that gripped the city for the last few weeks and the air conditioners are finally off, hopefully for good. The mangoes are also gone and the winter fruits are yet to appear in their usual abundance. This is then a time for transition from the long hard summer to the cold of the winter. Politics is losing its intensity and it seems that we will muddle through the next few months more or less with things as they are. And that is not all bad.

The Mian sahiban will perhaps get a chance to build a few more roads, underpasses and overpasses and sign a bunch of new memoranda of understanding with the Chinese. Crony capitalists will get a chance to enrich themselves a bit more and transfer their ever-increasing wealth abroad to safe havens in Dubai and other such places. As far as the poor and the salaried classes are concerned, they will continue to moan and groan about the ever-increasing prices of everything. And then, whenever the next election is held, they will most likely come out and vote back into power the very people that make them moan and groan.

The last couple of months have however been interesting and instructive. The sit-ins are still going on in Islamabad but the intensity is gone. Previously, I had advised the two leaders of the sit-ins to heed advice from old time revolutionaries: “He who runs away lives to fight another day.” But now I think they should follow the advice of Sahir Ludhianvi, an Urdu poet who, besides writing revolutionary songs and poems, also wrote some beautiful love songs. Sahir says in one of his better known poems: “If a story cannot be brought to its proper end, it is best then to give it an interesting twist and leave it in the middle” (my rough translation of “woh afsana jissay anjaam tak lana na ho mumkin, usay ik khubsurat mor dai ke chorna achaa”).

The question then is: what has changed after these conniptions in Islamabad, if anything at all? Everybody in Pakistan and every Pakistani expatriate has his or her own answer to that question. My feeling is that much has changed but the change is neither as radical nor as obvious as many expected. The present political dispensation will survive, albeit a little less sure of itself and perhaps, but only perhaps, we might see a new election within the next year or two. But all of what has happened does give me a chance to ruminate a bit on a couple of clichés that were repeated quite often.

First is, of course, the mantaqi anjam (logical conclusion). At the height of the political uncertainty that existed just a few weeks ago, I would call one of my better informed friends from the ‘land of the free’ to enquire about how things were going on Pakistan. His answer would be that things are moving towards their logical conclusion. When I asked him what the logical conclusion was, he would just say, “You know what it is.” I presume that what he meant was that the ‘third umpire’ was going to intervene. That, of course, never happened and with time this phrase has also lost its popularity in the media and in private conversations.

The other often repeated phrase was “democracy must be saved”. Here again considerable ambiguity exists about what sort of democracy we are talking about. Nawaz Sharif and his supporters had a different idea about democracy in their minds while his opponents camped out in Islamabad had quite the opposite take. Perhaps to slightly change a well-known saying, “Democracy lies in the eyes of the beholder.” The best I can say is that the present system, desirable or not, has survived at least for now. But there has been a significant realignment of political forces in the country. Perhaps the most important development, if one can call it that, is that Imran Khan and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) have survived and possibly emerged as an important third force that is here to stay.

The major ‘loser’ is Tahirul Qadri and his political party. Qadri had forced the political establishment to consider him a ‘player’, but as time has passed he seems to be losing whatever validity he had gained. Personally, I had thought that Qadri could become an important representative of moderate Islam and a counterweight to the ever-increasing tendency towards religious extremism. Sadly, he ignored that aspect of his political presence and thought that he would become the leader of a ‘revolution’. The real problem with Qadri was of course that he was not trying to save democracy but rather that he wanted to drive a stake through its heart.

And that brings me to the third phrase that I have always found a trifle unsettling: “stakeholders”. Whenever I hear that phrase, it always brings to mind the image of a rabble carrying stakes looking for a vampire to drive the stake through his heart for that is obviously the only way to kill a vampire. Here I must ask my readers to forgive me. I have probably watched too many vampire movies over the years. But now when I hear that phrase, what I imagine is all the purveyors of the present political dispensation walking around with stakes in hand looking for ‘real’ democracy to kill it once and for all.

Finally, a few words about the young Bilawal Bhutto Zardari. He is young and still looking for his political ‘sea legs’. Whether he can reverse the rapidly declining fortunes of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) is quite debatable and it is equally debatable whether he can or will be allowed to really lead the PPP during the next election cycle, whenever that might be.

The writer has practiced and taught medicine in the US. He can be reached at smhmbbs70@yahoo.com