Daily Times

After an absence of eight months I am returning to these pages. And no, I was not on some highly classified and super secret assignment during this time. Now that I am back, time to talk of some things that have changed during the last few months. First, of the four people that actually ran Pakistan eight months ago, only one is no longer there! Interim governments or not, the president, the Chief Justice (CJ) and the chief of the army staff (COAS) are all still around, the only one missing is the chief minister (CM) of the Punjab. And I do feel sorry for him. If somehow he could have dragged out the appointment of an interim CM till election time, he surely would have.

Also it seems that Pakistan is becoming ‘the country for older men’. The person with the most ‘power’ during the election campaign is the octogenarian election commissioner followed by the octogenarian interim prime minister (PM). And the interim CMs are no spring chickens either. As far as contenders for future power, all are into the seventh decade of their lives. The one most probable result of the elections will, therefore, be even more people in ‘government’ with hair replacements and dyed hair. Here in the interest of full disclosure I must admit that I am guilty of occasionally dusting just a ‘hint’ of mascara into my ‘prematurely’ greying moustache.

What else has changed over the last few months? As I was being driven home after my most recent trip to the US I could barely recognise the roads. The new flyways, underpasses, overpasses and the no-passes have scrambled the ‘geography’ of Lahore beyond my meagre comprehension. But I must admit that I did get home from the airport some five minutes sooner than I would have otherwise. So I suppose that is an improvement. Whether the billions of rupees spent on such improvement was money well spent is a different matter. And oh yes, there is that metro bus system for which all this was done. I am looking forward someday to ride on it all the way down and all the way up, or is it the other way around?

The other major change even in the Punjab is the sudden increase in sectarian and anti-minority violence. There were some rumblings in the press recently that either the CM was too busy building roads and distributing computers to young women (and men) to worry about such mundane things. Or else that he was not willing to take on the religious extremists for fear of alienating his party’s vote bank in the Punjab. After all, he does expect his party to sweep the upcoming elections so it would seem that he knows what he was doing.

Any discussion of elections in Pakistan must include some ‘conspiracy’ theories. From my perspective, the ‘Charter of Democracy’ signed by Mr Nawaz Sharif and Mohtrama Benazir Bhutto Shaheed in London a couple of years before the last general elections should be given some importance. Rumours when that document was signed suggested that a deal was made between the two former PMs of Pakistan that after the ‘next’ election, if either of their parties came into power, they would cede the government to the other one in midterm. Early collaboration between their parties after the last election did suggest some sort of an ‘understanding’.

President Zardari as the co-chairman of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) did not follow through on that ‘understanding. Possibly, he is now willing to let Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) to be the next governing party. Though this willingness might have something to do with the rather poor performance of the PPP government over the last five years. But then some ‘people in the know’ suggest that President Zardari is convinced that the PPP will form the next government. These are, however, the same people that insisted five years ago that General Musharraf and his Q-League minions were sure to be re-elected.

No, I am not going to forecast anything. As is well known, political pundits forecast election results with about the same accuracy as a coin toss. And there are no real political ‘pollsters’ and poll analysts like Nate Silver of The New York Times present in Pakistan to forecast election results with any level of certitude. But two things are worth considering. First is that only around 45 percent of eligible voters ever come out to vote in Pakistani general elections and second that Imran Khan and his party are still able to muster up a reasonable showing in Lahore in spite of bad weather.

If then the voter turnout during the upcoming elections exceeds 50 percent, and especially if the ‘youth’ do come out to vote in significant numbers, Khan’s tsunami might actually happen! Nobody except Khan is predicting that his party will win enough seats to form a government. But his party just might win enough seats to play the role of spoiler or king maker not just at the centre but also in the Punjab. Most political observers believe that Khan’s success if it happens will most likely come at the expense of PML-N.

As I recently discussed the possibility of relatively ‘valid’ election forecasts in Pakistan with a couple of astute journalist types, they felt that it would be impossible to collect any reasonably predictive and accurate data for two reasons. First that such data is hard to come by and second, so many of the candidates contesting in almost every election switch parties so often that it would be virtually impossible to establish any statistical correlation between past party performance and candidate success. The phenomenon of changing parties just before the elections is, however, something quite peculiar to Pakistani politics. Perhaps some bright political science student in one of our ‘premier universities’ is working on a doctoral thesis on just this topic.

Finally, when does the mango season start?

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