The month of January was named after the Roman deity Janus by Julius Caesar, who devised the calendar still in use the world over. Janus had two faces, one looking backward and one looking forward. This month also looks simultaneously back at sorrows past, and forward towards the emerging possibilities.
This New Year’s Day is loud with political confusion and the chatter of media persons and drawing room pundits gloating over the government’s discomfiture. Political changes, military putsches and or “blood in the streets” are being gleefully predicted. Not for the first time. The members of our elite regard Pakistan as a more or less provisional entity, ramshackle and always coming apart at the seams. More, in the paranoiac perspective of our insecure upper classes, there are ‘foreign hands’ always at work to dismantle this state. By way of proof, 1971 is trotted out as the dreadful example.
But in fact no ‘foreign hand’ stirred up the crisis of 1971. These, our elite itself created it (notwithstanding opportunistic fishing by outsiders in our seriously troubled waters) rather than hand over real power to the people. Despite Pakistan being not just a multi-ethnic state but one whose territory was uniquely divided into two separate portions, it still took 24 years of the establishment’s wrongdoings — exploitation, prejudice bordering on racialism, political mismanagement, denial of basic rights, a military massacre, a civil war and an international war — to forcibly cut Bangladesh away!
The term establishment, in my perspective here, comprises mostly the people educated in ‘English-medium’ schools, whether they are military or civil or corporate bureaucrats. These are the manipulators of the levers of power, whether governmental or economic. And these are the true elite of our land — not the much-maligned landlords or lawyers or the minuscule number of business magnates. The members of this elite hate most of all what Zulfikar Ali Bhutto applauded as the ‘vital noise and chaos of democracy’.
Let us put together certain of the attitudes shared by the members of this elite: first, a belief in the fundamental instability of the Pakistani nation-state; second, a paranoid obsession with ‘foreign conspiracies’; and, third, deep distrust of the 180 million inhabitants of this poverty-stricken but superbly beautiful land. They/we/us are prepared to use any means, however evil, to retain power and preserve our puny notions of status.
The horrors of 1971 stand as clear historical evidence of establishment culpability. So does the emergence of the man called Ziaul Haq, fresh from the slaughter of Palestinian refugees in Jordan. Zia deliberately unleashed the demons of bigotry, hypocrisy, ethnicity, sectarianism, the Kalashnikov culture and the curse of heroin on the people. He survived in absolute power for 11 long years, longer than any of our other rulers.
The most serious challenge to Zia came from the daughter of the complex, flawed statesman he had assassinated. This writer first saw the late and deeply lamented Benazir Bhutto in 1986, leading the mammoth, million-plus procession, the greatest this city had ever seen, which welcomed her back to Karachi. It was growing dark as we turned from Nursery towards Quaideen Chowk, but someone in a small jeep in front of the truck in which she rode was shining a spotlight onto her face. She seemed almost haloed there — a fairy princess, defying the blackness of Zia’s tyranny.
One saw her again a year or more later, during her wedding, flitting with great energy and speed from one guest to another. Concentrating thereafter on her role as a new wife, she seemed at times almost retired from politics.
And then Zia died and she led her party into the elections that followed, winning the largest number of seats despite the forces of the establishment working against her. The symbolism of her assumption of office after the nightmare of the Zia years was irresistible. But her performance can best be described as disappointing, and still more so the second time around. Whether it was the constraints imposed by her ‘deals’ or inadequate executive competence or alleged corruption, she accomplished little in her two terms in office, proceeding in due course into exile again.
Bhutto possessed both charisma and personal courage in extraordinary measure and in exile she quickly regained heroic status. Again making what this writer considered an entirely gratuitous set of ‘deals’, she returned to Pakistan. To extraordinary popular acclamation and adulation. To bombs. And bullets. And death.
She did not realise — perhaps no one did — how deeply the evil legacy of Zia had soaked into the nation’s politics, poisoning it with extremist violence and systematic, highly organised terrorism.
Her death was an event of fearful magnitude. Disbelief, horror, anger, fear (no time yet for grieving) clutched people’s hearts. For the world, the best known South Asian personality — for many Pakistanis, the People’s Princess — the charismatic Benazir Bhutto had been murdered.
She was a true titan of our land and our times. This objective fact is beyond dispute. One mourns her passing hugely and acknowledges her extraordinary stature in our failing history. In the wake of this immense event, the petty-minded functionaries of an establishment ignorant of the grand, unforgiving sweep of history, had triumphed again. Evil had lived on.
General Musharraf implied that it was her own fault for “sticking her neck out” of the sunroof. Yes, General, sticking her neck out is indeed what she had been doing, perhaps quixotically, courageously taking risks. However flawed her legacy, she will be remembered in our history books, long after Musharraf’s hypocritical regime is forgotten.
The ordinary people mourned her killing dramatically. It was a savage grief, a violent commemoration. Fire and smoke devoured the peace in our cities, an enormous suttee in reverse, as might have been part of the mourning rites for barbarian kings of ancient times. In the words of William Shakespeare, “Nor heaven nor earth have been at peace tonight.” The crowds in the streets were “raging for revenge” and, in a cacophony of angry voices, they all cried: “Havoc!”
That was three years ago. Much has changed, but little has improved, since then. But, Janus-faced, one continues to look forward to the next year. Perhaps the coming spring will begin to see a purging of the resident evil that has so become part of our lives.
The writer is a marketing consultant based in Karachi. He is also a poet