Who Will Provide Pakistan with Sincere Leadership?

Benazir Bhutto has finally been placed under house arrest in her palatial home located in the posh F-8 sector of Islamabad on November 9, 2007. She is the second Pakistani female icon to have been placed under house arrest after the imposition of emergency. The other is the well-known and much acclaimed figure of Asma Jehangir who has been held in deplorable conditions in her huge house located on the Main Boulevard in Lahore which is likely to fetch no less than one billion rupees in open market; the front of this house has a building that has rented office space to several banks which must be giving a rental of no less than Rs ten million a month if not more. This is some kind of tortuous arrest as she is emailing and writing to the whole world and diplomats are allowed to meet her. These are the two Suu Kyis of Pakistan, and won’t we all love to see their income tax returns which would be showing huge losses incurred by them year after year.

Pakistan is a fit case for anybody to study as to how and why States collapse. There is obviously no single explanation for this decline but the primary reason is its citizenry, and particularly its elite class, represented by icons like Benazir and Asma. There is hardly a member of this elite that is sincere to the people and the country; they literally look down upon the common man on the streets. They may never say this but regard the people jumping around their trucks and luxurious vehicles as nothing more than monkeys who might as well die like moths as they did on October 18 in Karachi when Benazir returned to Pakistan.

Their own children study in Oxford and don’t even go to schools in Pakistan. Benazir’s children are obviously going to inherit her political legacy but are going to school in Dubai and other places as the ones in Pakistan may not be appropriate for them; Asma’s daughter went to an exclusive private school in England but they all return to rule Pakistan. In such a state of affairs, it should not surprise anyone that people refuse to come out on the streets and protest dissolution of assemblies, dismissal of governments, suspension of the constitution, and introduction of provisional constitutional orders. What difference does it make to them? It is not their issue.

It has been almost a week since the emergency was imposed by General Musharraf on November 3. There has hardly been a protest worth mentioning. All we get to see are a few members of the elite class, wearing fancy sun glasses, with quite a few of the females with blonde hair, and many speaking only in English with a twang, holding placards in English and shouting slogans in accent whenever they see cameramen. Many a times, there are more pressmen than demonstrators. This is hardly a movement that is capable of toppling a military dictatorship.

November 9th Dawn carried a news item titled “LUMS and BNU echo with anti-emergency chants: The Emergency Times launched”. Reading this news, coupled with the editorial in the News titled “Revival of Student Power” of the same date gives an idea as if one is witnessing student riots on the scale and of the kind witnessed on the streets of Europe in the late sixties against the American atrocities in Vietnam.

One can only thank Dawn for not carrying this news on its front page but things cannot get more naïve and romantic than this. The news says that “student protests continued apace on Thursday amid indications that protestors are becoming better organised and developing a coherent command structure, as well as launching for the first time a cross-campus newsletter, The Emergency Times. Thousands of photocopies of the nine-page polemic, which details goings-on across universities in the whole of Pakistan and issues an urgent call to action, were circulated across the city’s universities.”All major political upheavals in Pakistan, and for that matter, in most of the countries, can be attributable to student agitations. There is none in the present instance in Pakistan: Constitution of the country has been suspended and replaced by a provisional document by one man, and simply to save himself; the whole Supreme Court was sacked because it was likely to give a verdict against the General. And what we witness is a student agitation which is led by the LUMS (Lahore University of Management Sciences). LUMS is perhaps the most prestigious school of Pakistan, and the most expensive one; it has a tiny student body and it can really be the last place to be leading an agitation.
On November 8, around 300 students marched peacefully through the campus and were met by Vice Chancellor Dr Syed Zahoor Hassan who informed them to remain in the sports complex or near the cafeteria, and not to approach the main gate, and remain peaceful. Why were the students asked by the VC not to approach the gate; were the students agitating against something internal to LUMS. Because the police in heavy riot gear and armed with tear gas maintained a heavy presence outside the main gate for the third day running, what the students said, to intimidate both students on the inside and reporters on the outside. Ooohee. Isn’t this scary? But revolution is coming….This mammoth and formidable student agitation is led by none other than one Professor Aasim Sajjad who cannot even properly speak Urdu; the agitation against the emergency started on November 3 and this professor has already been recently released from jail, and he managed to rouse the students with an inspiring speech. This must be one movement of its kind where agitators are being addressed in a foreign language; so much for indigenous movements and nexus with the grass roots and the common man. Are you still surprised that people of Pakistan are failing to come out on the streets?The 300 strong student agitation at LUMS is matched by an equally formidable movement by students at BNU (Beaconhouse National University), where students held a peaceful protest that brought together around 50 students in the main courtyard area of the Zafar Ali Road campus in Lahore. Their leader said: “We don’t fear arrest but it’s a matter of timing and it’s about the cause: we must do our utmost for the cause and getting arrested too early won’t help that way.” This guy is one Che Gueverra.The students at the BNU were lucky to be addressed by none other than the blonde daughter of Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Salima Hashmi who, goes without saying, was also recently released. Salima and Aasim’s set a record of some sort for being incarcerated for quicky short time and God knows where. They were never arrested. Problem is that they would like their names to be associated with arrests and find the thought of being incarcerated in a torturous fort for decades like Nelson Mandela romantic and attractive but the thought scares the hell out of them; they cannot leave the luxury of their centrally heated and air-conditioned homes, and who is going to give them scotch there. They represent the class which draws salaries in hundreds of thousands of rupees; keeps looking for consultancy contracts that pays them hundreds of dollars every day; they rub shoulders with the westerners and the multi-national institutions like the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank but criticize them at the same time. They are not sincere and are hypocrites without even realizing it. They hardly deserve to lead some of the best students of Pakistan at the prestigious institutions like LUMS and BNU; the students of Pakistan deserve better.The bottom-line to this cynical analysis is simple: the only hope for Pakistan is to get rid of the present corrupt, insincere, dishonest and hypocrite leadership and opt for intelligent leadership that is capable of identifying with the lot of the common man. This is where maulvis and Taliban succeed; a normal citizen of this country can identify with a Taliban leader who speaks the same language and the same dialect, and eats with him and in the same manner, as he does. This Taliban’s wife does not dye her hair blonde and does not demonstrate on the streets wearing skin tight clothing with an expensive pair of sun-glasses looped over her hair.

Who will provide Pakistan with this kind of leadership!