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EDITORIAL: Ho hum strike!

If one is to judge from the ultimatum appended to the MMA-ARD-plus pahya-jaam (wheel-jam) strike on Friday, then it was a failure. The strike was only partially successful at the national level and did nothing to advance its objective — force or warrant the resignation of President Pervez Musharraf. One can say, however, that there was significant popular agreement with the allegation that the local polls had been blatantly rigged and that inflation had gone too high to justify smugness in the ruling circles of the country.

Before one looks at the results produced by the strike in the various regions of the country, a couple of factors must be kept in mind: the strike was called on Friday which is already observed as a sort of full holiday in the smaller cities of the country. Barring Karachi, every city in Sindh including Hyderabad closes on Friday. The same is true of the Punjab, including the city of high commerce, Faisalabad. Also, the big cities have to be divided by sectors to judge the success or failure of the strike, each sector counting as a small city.

Another significant variable was the non-violent nature of the strike. Barring a few incidents, neither the government nor the opposition used coercion to make the people obey their orders. In the past, the MMA had adopted the following pattern: call the strike on Sunday and then, to make up for lack of manifest protest on an off-day, call out processions that would invariably clash with the administration. It is therefore fair to say that this Friday the ground reality was a fair index of what people thought of the government and the opposition. Perhaps a third caveat should relate to the fear in some city markets that it is better to shut down on a half-day than risk damage to one’s expensive inventories.

In Lahore, the wholesale market, already inclined to stop work around midday in deference to the Friday prayers, was completely closed down. In other areas, some markets were completely shut while others were completely open. Private transport was fully operational while taxis and other trade-related transport were off the roads for obvious reasons, including the taxi-drivers’ (misplaced) fear of getting beaten up. One TV reporter observed in Lahore that the Jamaat-e-Islami was active in peaceful persuasion while the Nawaz League, the traditionally dominant party in the city, remained completely hands-off. If that was the case then a fifty-fifty result of the strike is commendable for the opposition.

Most observers would be surprised at the failure of the strike in Peshawar, the heart of the Land of Piety, promised by the MMA through its Hasba Bill. Traders and transporters did not respond well to the opposition’s call for a complete strike and continued doing business on Jamrud Road. Only traders and businessmen in the interior city, Qissa Khwani Bazaar, Shoba Bazaar, Khyber Bazaar, GT Road and Sadar Bazaar kept their shops closed. This was a bad show on the part of the MMA whose rivals, the ANP, supported the MMA-ARD call for the strike. One is forced to speculate that the lack of response (which should have been total) is in some ways a measure of the people’s assessment of how the MMA has ruled the NWFP.

In Quetta the strike was completely successful. In the capital and other northern districts of Balochistan, more than 60 political workers were arrested. All the MMA-ARD parties plus Pushtun and Baloch nationalists of PONAM were able to actually implement the “wheel-jam” part of the strike, which the leaders had probably tacked on to the strike call for acoustic effect. (PPPP leader Amin Fahim had also used the words dama-dam mast qalandar, which is a not-so-hidden threat of violence.) The strikers in Quetta duly called for the dismissal of President Musharraf, and fresh general elections under a reformed and independent Election Commission.

The opposition must make a fair assessment of the strike. If, according to them, President Musharraf has done everything wrong in addition to rigging — like talking to Israel and betraying the Palestinians, forcibly registering the madrassas, letting India sign a defence pact with America, etc — then the people would not only have closed their cities down but also come out beating their chests in protest. But it is obvious that the people in the cities of Pakistan do not buy the entire line of “betrayal” fed to them by the opposition. The opposition also must judge the “piece-meal” nature of the strike in light of their recent inter- and intra-party rifts, which could not have inspired the masses with confidence. President Musharraf is contrasted not only to the combined opposition but also the PML which he patronises. Internal cleavages that appeared in it during the local polls actually showed him in a better light than the “politicians” in general. *

EDITORIAL #2: Surprise, surprise, it’s Mubarak again!

In Egypt, the voter turnout was low at 25 percent on September 7, but 80 percent of those who voted chose President Hosni Mubarak as president for another six years for the fifth time. Until Mr Mubarak himself decreed a change of rules earlier this year, no one actually competed for the post. Egypt’s parliament chose a single “candidate” — always the incumbent — who was then confirmed in a referendum. This time, each legal party could propose a candidate, but only parties vetted by a state-controlled committee were legal. This excluded the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s best-organised opposition group. Independents could run, too, but only after securing 250 endorsements from elected officials, nearly all of whom belonged to the ruling party.

There is space for becoming endlessly cynical about the Arab world, but let us be grateful for the partial opening up of a system that Mr Mubarak has run solo for a quarter of a century. It is like Saudi Arabia letting 50 percent of local government seats be contested by the people earlier this year. There can be other ways of being imperfect. Look at Pakistan, we have a full-fledged constitutional democracy now for over 50 years, but it is hardly something that the world would want to emulate. *

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