The JUI chief, the redoubtable Maulana Fazlur Rehman, forewarned the nation that if the election of the new prime minister ‘failed’, martial law would be the next step towards the resolution of the current political crisis. While the Maulana’s Cassandra-like prediction has lost much of its weight after the smooth election of the stopgap prime minister — June 23 to an unknown date between October-November this year to February 2013 — martial law would continue to stay as yet another sorry finale of political collapse. Maulana sahib went on to foretell that if the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) did not act ‘reasonably’ and take the correct decision, martial law would be ‘imminent’. He went on to submit his nomination papers for the slot of prime minister ‘not to withdraw’ but to fight to the bitter end. For want of a promising response from any quarter, however, the Maulana nimbly sidestepped to leave the battlefield free for the PPP.
The Maulana’s ‘silent prayer’ was not answered. No generals obliged him to upend the prime ministerial slot. Elections were held on June 23 as scheduled and won by the PPP as expected. The army stayed clear of the exercise.
The coalition, presided over and cemented by President Asif Ali Zardari, stands united to dispel any chance of intervention by the ‘third force’, i.e. the military establishment. It should stay like that for as long as there are enough loaves and fish of office to share. More so, as long as the skilled President Zardari is there to run with his junior coalition partners and hunt with the hound of his own PPP.
It is interesting to find two persons as far apart as the ecclesiastical Maulana sahib and a dyed-in-the-wool secularist like Altaf Hussain, the MQM supremo, to stay on the same side in the current crisis and agree on the ‘only sagacious’ approach of President Zardari, ‘if democracy was to continue in the country’. Differences would have to be ‘set aside’ and decisions taken with ‘political acumen’, otherwise, democracy in the country ‘might suffer’. Mr Hussain assured the Maulana to convey his ‘concerns’ to the president. It is most intriguing to find the MQM chief sitting pretty in the distance, blithely acting as a conduit between the president and the Maulana sahib in Islamabad, sitting almost in the shadow of the presidency.
As for the Maulana sahib and his one ambition to occupy the prime ministerial chair, the seat happens to be too small for his formidable physical bulk and too big for his small party. What militates against his rise to the top job happens to be his proclaimed Islamic credentials unshared by the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam (Noorani) and the Jamaat-e-Islami, by far the most organised party in the Islamic club.
The Jamaat has its own politico-ecclesiastical code known after its founder, the learned Maulana Abul Ala Maududi. This leaves Maulana Fazal sahib and his party to plough their lonely political furrow. Like a shrewd political practitioner, however, the Maulana sahib keeps his options open to keep for his party and himself the way to the corridors of state power open at a minimal cost, consistent with his own and his party’s political agenda.
The Maulana is known to have enjoyed a reasonably smooth working relationship with the ruling party of the day, be it that of General Zia or General Musharraf or President Zardari. As for the prospect of the generals suddenly staging a coup d’état in the existing highly volatile and hopelessly compounded situation, any interventionist move on their part would be of little or no help to them or to the country.
It could even unravel the organic and tightly structured character of the army. The military, as a whole, happens to be the largest, the best trained and educated single institution in the country. It has learnt its lessons from its past proclivity to jump at the unsteady civilian bandwagon and place itself in the driving seat, with grave consequences. The coup leaders would invariably realise that what they believed to be an ordinary sore to be removed by a minor surgical strike happened to be a deeply penetrated cancerous growth.
The scary martial law serial opened with the Lahore Martial law of 1953. At 1400 hrs on March 6, Major-General Mohammad Azam Khan, GOC 10 Infantry Division, declared martial law throughout the city commencing from the city end of the Cantonment Bridge up to the city end of Ravi Bridge. Supposed to be an emergency surgical operation to end within a week or ten days, the Lahore martial law went on for some 70 days, finally ending on April 17, 1953. It took only a couple of days to burst its bounds, claim the dismissal of Prime Minister Khawaja Nazimuddin and initiate summary trials of Maulana Abul Ala Maududi and Abdus Sattar Khan Niazi. The martial law court, presided over by a major, awarded the death sentence to both, mercifully never carried out.
All four subsequent martial laws — Field Marshal Ayub’s 1958-1969, General Yahya’s 1969-1971, General Zia’s 1977-1988 and General Musharraf’s military rule, 1999-2008 — flew back into the faces of the perpetrators, leaving the country in a state worse than the pre-martial law crisis.
One could bet General’s Kayani’s martial law is nowhere round the corner. To whose aid would General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani come by assuming the supreme state power? To President Asif Ali Zardari’s, to the new prime minister, Raja Pervez Ashraf’s and their motley band of advisors and ministers?
So please, do not keep the army card up your sleeve. It is a little more than the two of clubs. Thus far, no further. Apologies to the Maulana sahib for the army failing to ‘oblige’ him. Let the prospect of yet another martial law stay just as his ‘silent prayer’.
The writer is a retired brigadier and can be reached at [email protected]