To breathe easily again
By: Ghazi Salahuddin
Where, as the poet said, is the life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
Well, it may perhaps not be appropriate to invoke T S Eliot to describe our state of mind this week. But some questions could surely be raised about how we devoted so much time and energy to crises that many of us believed would quickly demolish “this sorry scheme of things entire.” There were occasions, in this month of January when we waited breathlessly for something to happen in the next few hours.
Now that there is some easing of tensions between the national “institutions,” it should be possible for our pundits to breathe easily again. It may be hard for some of them, conditioned as they are to crying wolf in an agitated mode. At the same time, of course, there is every possibility of something sinister coming up suddenly. This is Pakistan, after all.
In any case, there is this lull in the storm. The first hint of it came on Tuesday when Chief of the Army Staff Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani and ISI director general Lt. -Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha called on Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani at the Prime Minister’s House in Islamabad. According to published reports, the meeting suggested that relations between the civilian and military leadership “may be normalising.”
On Wednesday, talking to the media at the Chaklala Airbase before flying to Davos to attend the World Economic Summit, Gilani said something that reporters saw as a retraction-one more time-of his earlier statements. “I want to dispel the impression that the military leadership acted unconstitutionally or violated rules,” he explained.
This was a reference to his interview with The People’s Daily Online in which he surprisingly had said that the affidavits submitted to the Supreme Court in the Memogate affair by Kayani and Pasha were “unconstitutional and illegal” because they had not been approved by the “competent authority.”
Expectedly, the military leadership, congenitally concerned about its supremacy in the power game, responded with an ISPR press release which said that the prime minister’s remarks would have “very serious ramifications with potentially grievous consequences for the country.”
One can imagine the tremors that such a statement could cause in a country brought up on conspiracy theories. A write-up in this newspaper by Mani Shankar Aiyar, the India MP who is well-known in Pakistan, published on Wednesday was titled: “The coup that never was.” This was because Mani had come to Pakistan at that time to participate in a parliamentarians’ dialogue organised by Pildat.
Earlier in the month, the prime minister had made a hard-hitting statement in the National Assembly about the “state within the state,” though he later qualified this statement in a rather dim-witted fashion-in the same manner that he would not have the nerve to defend the contents of the unsigned memo that was promptly dispatched to the dustbin by its intended recipient.
When the tempo was building up, injecting more and more frenzy into deliberations of many of our talk-shows, flaming headlines were also provided by the Supreme Court proceedings. The NRO case has been there for sometime and it did provide a sensational development when the prime minister was summoned to explain why contempt of court proceedings should not be initiated against him for not obeying the NRO verdict. Do you recall the electrifying moments that Gilani’s appearance in the court had provided that morning, courtesy live coverage by all news channels? An additional thrill was the choice of his lawyer-the hero of the lawyers’ movement. On this occasion, Aitzaz Ahsan had a more complicated role to play.
But when it comes to playing a role, there has been nothing in our chronicle of blunders to compare with the antics of Mansoor Ijaz, who has insisted on playing the lead in the Memogate extravaganza. David Ignatius, writing in The Washington Post, called him “a quixotic accuser” in a story that “would have been branded unrealistic if written as fiction.” Just consider the black comedy that he enacted by threatening to come to Pakistan to give his supposedly lethal evidence-and not coming for “security” reasons. Hence a stalemate in the sordid business of Memogate.
What will happen now? To be sure, the tendency to sensationalise every political incident or rumour will continue, considering the resourcefulness of the “sources.” However, it appears that for the time being the present arrangement is not likely to be packed up tomorrow-or the day after, or in a week or so. The pundits will have to wait and amuse themselves with matters that are not so toxic. They also have the gift of Mehrangate.
As for Asif Zardari, he has a question to ponder. What does a survivor do after he has survived? The point here is that he himself has not been vindicated. Those of us who support the preservation of the present democratic process, for rational and pragmatic reasons, are terribly unhappy with the performance of the present government. Popular discontent with the state of affairs has reached a point that Imran Khan is able to pose as a “saviour.”
As for the media, the message seems obvious. It has squandered so much time and precious resources in whipping up people’s emotions and wishfully building scenarios that are not realistic. Now that the prime minister has admitted that his earlier statements were made under a “unique situation when there was no clarity” and that now “we have to be on the same page,” the media may shift its attention to more substantive issues.
Come to think of it, our society is in dire straits and not entirely because of the corruption of the high officials or poor governance. The law and order situation is alarming. One major task of the media is to create an environment in which a serious debate on our fundamental problems can take place. For instance, there has been little investigation into or analysis of the religious militancy that prevails in Pakistan. When we vote for democracy, we have also the responsibility for making our society safe for democratic freedoms and practices.
Look at the sectarian killings that take place on a regular basis, the use of religion in politics being essentially divisive. There has been another spell of targeted killings in Karachi in a sectarian context. It is difficult, but the role of the security agencies in these matters is to be probed and debated, so that our national sense of direction can be set right. And when something like Memogate is offered to the media, it should look at it more carefully before lapping it up.
Source: The News
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