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COMMENT: A dearth of greatness —Salman Tarik Kureshi

This enormously bloated government, supposedly a political and popularly elected executive, has rigidly avoided trying to establish any kind of rapport with their electorate. Nor have they offered the people any kind of vision or programme or even a memorable bunch of slogans

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton must have been surprised at the voluble resentment expressed against the EPPA, otherwise known as the Kerry-Lugar Act. This piece of legislation, intended as an expression of US commitment towards the people of Pakistan and our fledgling democracy, appears to have had quite the opposite effect.

Why? Is it too little, too late? Well, perhaps, but something is better than nothing and this is many times what has been proffered in the past.

Is the tone and language of the Act egregiously patronising and insulting? Well, perhaps a little tactless here and there, but nothing really to get worked up about.

Are the so-called ‘conditionalities’ outrageously daunting? Not really. But there is a point in this to which we shall return.

It is not intended to enter into any analysis or defence of the KLA’s specifics here. It is not necessary since, let us face it, the multiple criticisms directed against this piece of legislation of a separate and sovereign country have little to do with these specifics anyhow. Their target is not the US President and Congress, but the incumbent government of Pakistan.

And this government — President Zardari in particular — are like sitting ducks in a circus shooting gallery. Throw anything at them and it hits home. This is not just the common anti-incumbency attitude of troubled times. There is a terrible dearth of leadership apparent here, on the part of the party in power.

Let us look at the leadership of the PPP that, in power or out, has dominated the public’s imagination for over 40 years now. Initially formed at the residence of Mr JA Rahim in Karachi, it was officially launched at a convention at the Pak Tea House, Lahore, in November 1967. The party was conceived and constructed as a left-wing entity, mobilising the energies of the under-privileged segments of society and the intelligentsia to accomplish a programme of quasi-socialist reforms. Its first chairman was the charismatic Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Its secretary-general — at that time, an important party office — was JA Rahim.

The PPP set up a knowledgeable set of internal policy think tanks, a well-articulated network of party offices and an enormous number of voluntary workers across the country. The combination of Bhutto’s spellbinding oratory and the anti-Establishment manifesto proved irresistible. In the 1970 elections, the PPP picked up three-quarter of the Punjab NA seats, over half the Sindh seats and close to a third of the NA seats in the NWFP. The only province of present-day Pakistan where the PPP suffered a setback was Balochistan.

Was it the party’s stridently social-democratic manifesto or the charisma of Bhutto that led to its success? It is a moot point since, a third of the way through his stint in power, the party chairman himself began to make fundamental changes in its programmes and leadership. He began to sideline or get rid of staunch left-wingers like Mukhtar Rana, Mubashir Hasan, Mahmood Ali Kasuri, Meraj Mohammed Khan, Hanif Ramay and JA Rahim himself.

Inevitably, the complexion of the Party shifted from that of a party of progressive nationalism to a kind of rural based anti-capitalism. Despite this change of direction, the radical Party programme was in fact fulfilled. This, coupled with the intense but abrasive personality of Bhutto, proved divisive. While many continued to feel a passionate adulation towards him, there were others who hated him utterly. Many will remember Mian Nawaz Sharif’s frequent one-time assertions that the name Bhutto made his blood boil.

After Bhutto’s incarceration, show-trial and assassination, his widow formally looked after party affairs until 1986, when her daughter was to spring dramatically into the leadership slot and the limelight of history.

Benazir Bhutto remained the undisputed leader of the PPP (1986 to 2007) for a far longer period than her father (1967 to 1979) or her mother (1979 to 1985) combined. In this time, she remoulded and recast the party. The stridently left-wing, anti-capitalist party of her father adopted a moderate, pro-privatisation, liberal economic agenda. ZAB’s anti-imperialist, pro-Third World nationalism was succeeded by a pragmatically nuanced reaching-out to the West. Bhutto’s anti-Indian rhetoric was transformed into a media love-fest beside the late Rajiv Gandhi. And in so many other ways, the earlier party postures were moderated into attitudes that, while broadly liberal, were relatively pragmatic and moderate. The officials of the party now wore business suits instead of the awami joras and Mao jackets of their predecessors.

Under Benazir Bhutto, the PPP assumed an overall more centrist stance than before. In this, it was similar to the historic pendulum swing away from the romantic radicalism of the 1960s, also manifested by other liberal and socialist parties around the world, from the American Democratic Party through the German SDP to the Chinese Communist Party.

Her assassination thrust the present party leadership to the forefront. Elevated by fate into the leadership position, history placed two burdens on President Zardari’s all-too-human and all-too-fallible shoulders. The first of these related to his perceived unsavoury past. Whether the many allegations were true or not is beside the point here. The fact is that this country had already known such immense archetypes of evil (think Zia-ul Haq), corruption (think of those surrounding both Zia and Musharraf), power-hunger, irresponsibility and administrative incompetence (think Musharraf on both counts), that anything that has even been so much as alleged about Mr Zardari pales into insignificance beside such as these. So, let us put this kind of talk aside. The bottom line is that the sovereign people of this country had voted the PPP headed by Mr Zardari to power. In the words of the late Manzur Qadir, “When the sovereign has clearly spoken, the majesty of his voice must silence all petty bickering.”

So, let us ignore all the bickering and point-scoring that the people’s verdict has in fact already superseded and made redundant. Let us come to the other burden placed on the shoulders of President Zardari, the burden of leadership. Pakistan, not for the first time, stands at a crossroads. And it is the party led by Mr Zardari that has been chosen — again, not for the first time — to guide the people up the path of national re-integration. Given the magnitude of the nation’s deficits and disasters, this was to be no ordinary task. It would require highly creative leadership abilities and more than a small measure of that quality we call Greatness.

“Be not afraid of greatness,” wrote Shakespeare, “Some men are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them.” In which of these categories, if any, can we locate our president?

Today, after supine inaction — even, perhaps, connivance — of the last several years, our armed forces are unequivocally in action against the terrorist insurgency and serious efforts are underway to restore Pakistan’s sovereignty in the areas from which it had been ousted. President Zardari and COAS General Kayani both deserve commendation.

But do the people, who are now clearly behind the army in this campaign, accord any credit to the president on this score? Or to the prime minister? Or any other minister?

Let the facts be faced. President Zardari and the PPP have completely failed to build any kind of political constituency or mobilise public opinion on this issue, or on any other issue. Nor do they seem to have made any serious effort. This enormously bloated government, supposedly a political and popularly elected executive, has rigidly avoided trying to establish any kind of rapport with their electorate. Nor have they offered the people any kind of vision or programme or even a memorable bunch of slogans.

On the other side of the Pakistani political coin (not that of the opposition, but of the generals) public opinion has been very competently and very effectively remoulded by the ISPR and Psy-Ops, away from the earlier pro-Jihadi locus and towards enthusiasm for the military campaigns against the TTP. The anti-TTP direction is very finely and very accurately calibrated, to exclude pointing in any related, but different, direction.

To return to the outcry against the EPPA, is the connection to the foregoing not apparent? The specifics of the Act are not the prime motivation for its bludgeoning by media pundits and politicos alike, many of whom have clearly not even bothered to read the legislation. No, these are mere jungle noises: the calls and cries of scavengers who sense the lions gathering downwind from a leaderless herd that bleats ineffectually and mills around itself without direction.

The writer is a marketing consultant based in Karachi. He is also a poet

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