For once, let us be Pakistan-centric

Let us hope that the new govt will make Pakistan-centric policies rather than India- or Afghan-centric policies.

One is tempted to assume that the prime minister’s (PM) decision to keep the portfolios of both defence and foreign affairs in his office is intended to send forth a loud and clear signal to all and sundry that from now on, the buck will stop at the PM’s desk. For good or bad reason, it appears that now there is only one power centre in Pakistan and all decisions and policies would flow from it. Of course, the PM’s decisions will have the tempering benefit of the twosome think tank in the persons of Sartaj Aziz, adviser on national security and Tariq Fatemi, special assistant on foreign affairs. And, of course, the Defence Committee of the Cabinet (DCC), the parliamentary committees on defence and foreign affairs and above all, the cabinet itself, will serve as the PM office’s extended brain trust on these two highly sensitive subjects.

That is how a genuine parliamentary system works. But in the past, whenever an elected government would be in the saddle in Islamabad, the defence and foreign ministers would amount to no more than ceremonial heads of their respective ministries. Even the directly elected PM would be the chief executive in name only, with the indirectly elected president and a decidedly undergraduate permanent establishment, calling the shots. It was almost the same even during the last five years. The reason why the two PMs — Yousaf Raza Gilani and Raja Pervaiz Ashraf — had remained beholden to the president was because the latter had tried to run the party from the presidency. It was, perhaps, to avert a repeat of a Farooq Leghari-like situation that the co-chairman of the party opted to enter the presidency. This did enable him to effectively guide his party to complete its term but in the process, he became the single most decisive reason for the Pakistan Peoples Party’s (PPP) bad show in the last polls. From a national party, it has now been reduced to a party of interior Sindh. And the performance of the Sindh government itself, during the last five years, was far from ideal because the co-chairman of the party was managing the province from the presidency, with Qaim Ali Shah serving as a mere frontman. A repeat seems to be in the offing and in case that is how the PPP leadership prefers to rule Sindh, then perhaps, we are finally witnessing the tragic demise of a great party

Meanwhile, let us hope that PM Nawaz Sharif would use all those powers that he now enjoys to make Pakistan-centric policies rather than India-centric or Afghan-centric policies. For instance, we must not only make it very clear to the Afghans that we have no role in the Afghan endgame except that of a facilitator and that, too, only if asked for, but also prove by our actions that we mean what we are saying. India was too amiable at the time of Agra but now, it appears to have acquired a kind of irritating arrogance in dealings with Pakistan. But instead of being goaded into revisiting our tried and tested but failed strategies, we must try to learn to cope with the increasing asymmetry between our two countries and deal with the situation by focusing more on our own state of the economy and social indices.

One cannot but welcome some of the initial actions taken by the new government like naming a well-known nationalist and a commoner as the chief minister of troubled Balochistan, resisting the temptation of keeping the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf out of power in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, giving a very important cabinet post to a minority member and abolishing the corrupting practice of granting development funds to parliamentarians. However, one cannot but detect a tendency in the PML-N leadership to keep most of the important political posts within the family and among “loyal friends”. Their competence is not in question but family and friend-centric parties are known to have withered away, suffering from massive internal haemorrhage. The party lost the Chaudhry brothers because the younger one felt it was his turn to become chief minister of Punjab in 1997. Javed Hashmi left because he felt it was his turn to become the leader of the opposition after the 2008 polls.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 12^th, 2013.                                                                                        

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