Over the last couple of days, we have seen General (Retd) Pervez Musharraf shedding, with considerable pomp and circumstance, what he called his ‘second skin’, and emerging as the elected civilian President of the Republic. This, for the retired General, was a major transition. But, look around. The sun will still rise in the east and the polluted tides of Karachi will still rise and fall with the moon. Nothing has really changed. Nor would much have changed if this transition had happened much earlier. For that is in the nature of such transitions, whose value is only symbolic (some would say ‘cosmetic’) and not substantive.
On the other hand, the lengthy delays in bringing about this particular transition have been very expensive for the nation. Most recently, it has cost us most of the Supreme Court and the Constitution. The question one needs to ask is: if ordinary transitions are so difficult to achieve, then are the transformations dreamed of by the more fiery advocates of change merely illusory?
I do not think it is possible to unequivocally answer that question since opinion as to what constitutes a ‘real’ transformation — one to a liberal democracy, or to a populist egalitarian society, or to an Islamist theocracy — will vary. What does not vary is the generalised perception that things are, somehow, not right. What is near-universal is a desire for change, whether through transition or through transformation.
Let us take a look at the leading figures on the other side of the political divide than President Musharraf. Benazir Bhutto, leader of the largest political party, is clear about the fact that she advocates transition and not transformation. Maulana Fazlur Rehman is ambivalent. While ideologically, as an advocate of Islamic Revolution, he would be counted among the transformationists, his political strategies are those of compromise, and not confrontation. The same is true, in another sense, of Qazi Hussain Ahmed and the other Islamists who have come together in the APDM and who are making common cause with Mian Nawaz Sharif, whose policies when in power were certainly not designed to bring about a social or cultural Revolution.
The present politicians, let us be clear, from Chaudhry Shujaat to Benazir Bhutto to Nawaz Sharif to Maulana Fazlur Rehman, are all parts of the extended Establishment. And so they should be, as leaders of inclusive, legitimate political organisations, with a stake in ensuring the continuation of our elite-driven, post-colonial society. While striking populist postures, in order to interest a largely poverty-ridden voting public, our politicians are all more or less a part of the numerically relatively small elite that dominates, controls and runs this country. They are therefore at best all transitionists, whatever their ostensible protestations. And there is nothing whatsoever wrong with being honest about that fact.
Then who, you may ask, are these transformationists? Clearly, they would need to represent points of view that fundamentally challenge the status quo. They must be those perceived as ‘Rebels with a Cause’. In an earlier article in this newspaper, I had suggested that two entirely contradictory images defined (at that time) the political iconography of rebellion in Pakistan: that of the then-Chief Justice of Pakistan and that of the late Maulana Rashid Ghazi. These two can be seen as icons of alternate transformationist visions.
To look at the second icon first, I believe we are quite clear about the kind of social and political transformation that the late Rashid Ghazi and the armed insurrectionists in Waziristan, Swat, etc. would like to accomplish. What is more puzzling is the process of iconic transformation of one, who was yesterday a ‘troublesome priest’ with a penchant for breaking the law, into a Ghazi and Shaheed and in fact almost a folk hero. It is hard to say what exactly happened to convert this alleged establishment cat’s paw into a figure of revolutionary significance. Even after Maulana Rashid’s elder brother had provided us with cross-dressing comic relief, the armed resistance at Lal Masjid continued for a week, taking the lives even of the fabled SSG and requiring, finally, an immense application of military firepower to end it. Not only had this straw man acquired unexpected teeth and powerful limbs, he has achieved the status of a martyr and an iconic folk hero.
But surely, everyone realises Maulana Rashid was a violent and dangerous law-breaker, who was running a state within a state and therefore had to be exterminated. Please, let’s get real. Look at the processes that are achieving maturity in Waziristan, in Swat. Or that have been growing, for that matter, in Gujranwala, or in Multan, or in Karachi.
To turn now to the second iconic figure, who emerged as such during his epic twenty-five hour drive from Islamabad to Lahore. We all observed how ordinary people spontaneously poured out of their homes, shops, cottages all the way along his route to create a triumphal procession of a magnitude that we have never witnessed before. By contrast with the violence associated with people like Rashid Ghazi, this tumultuous outpouring of the people was entirely and totally peaceful. In the eyes of the people who lined his way, the former Chief Justice represented, in a sense totally opposite to the violence of the ‘Muslim’ extremists, an icon of resistance to the status quo. He was perceived as a man who had said, “No, enough!”
And all this is perhaps only a measure of how naïve, or how desperate, the average man in this country has become. The point is that we, as a nation, are extremely short of real heroes. Not figures on horseback, nor condescending members of the elite…but genuine political heroes, who can understand the intense cravings of ordinary people for a measure of justice, of security, of dignity, of hope, in their lives. And thereby create institutions that impact directly on the lives and futures of the citizenry. Because historically, it seems, nothing much has changed here, from the times of the Moghuls, through the British Raj, down to today.*
The writer is a marketing consultant based in Karachi. He is also a poet