The challenge of Thar

Bilawal should define himself, his politics. Either follow degenerative trend of saaeens of fore, or follow his dream.

Bilawal Bhutto’s grandpa was a charmer. He could sway the crowds to his chants and on most difficult and intricate issues — political, personal or social — he would seek and gain their countenance with remarkable ease. Grand display of sharing a personal weakness for alcohol, that had by then been made into a political fallibility at the hands of an aggressive opposition, he ventured out to his endeared crowds and famously said, “thori si pee leta hoon tou is mein kya burai hai; logon ka khoon toe nahin peeta”. Truer words have not been spoken. In one stroke, he had them condone a personal weakness as they lovingly approved of his playful proclivity, and blunted his Rightist opposition’s most devastating tool against him.

As ZAB returned from difficult negotiations at Simla with Indira Gandhi, having already lost East Pakistan and a large number of prisoners still in India’s custody, he again reverted to the crowds in a public address to meet an underlying precondition to recognise Bangladesh for the return of the prisoners. He got the crowds moving to his every note as he spoke to them. When to every question that he posed to the thousands before him, they all shouted a ‘yes’ in unison, he slipped in ‘the’ question: whether he should now recognise Bangladesh? In that great moment of public ecstasy and with the momentum that his personal chemistry had engendered, he got a loud ‘yes’ and a cheer for an answer. It seemed the people of Pakistan had, with their own efforts, indeed carved out Bangladesh as a measure of nobility. In such management of emotion and a personalised relationship with his people, he had crossed a most difficult political Rubicon of his times. He underlined what is most critical in public political life — the sense that he belongs to the people and that the people belong to him.

Of Berkeley and Oxford, ZAB was soon to immerse himself in the local political culture of the subcontinent, though. And those were still relatively subtle days of nuanced politics where values and political beliefs dominated the urge to play a more exploitative genre of what was to follow and is now at its basest. What these fine institutions ingrained into people who they taught seemed to subsume in time to their most ruthless, manipulative and exploitative form of politics. Thar has tragically exhibited this in the past weeks.

Bilawal’s mother was equally suave. Of Oxford and Harvard, she too slipped rapidly into the shabby lows of subcontinental political culture. While ZAB may have been forced to reluctantly embrace the surrounding norms for his political survival, Benazir had seen the rough and tough of politics already and would have come back with a predisposition to the only manner of politics relevant to our climes. That her marriage to Asif Zardari may have only hastened the process is a given. But then Mr Zardari was a local product and knew only one way to survive and succeed.

Thar, then dear Bilawal, is only a reflection of the politics that you have chosen to enter. Since it is early days, poor Bilawal still might be wondering what to do with his teachings at Oxford beyond the Sindh Festival that his elders may have schemed for him for his domestication and initiation to the local political culture. Such teaching and learning is best cast aside as one prepares to wade deep into the lows of a political philosophy turned on its head.

At Oxford, Bilawal must have learnt that politics was a public service. Not here though. In the subcontinental thinking, it is a means to muster power and obtain proximity to pelf. The people — the jamhoor — the basis of this contract between the politician and his constituents, are only relevant in this subcontinental form of democracy to elevate the politician to a position of power. Thereon, the people, the jamhoor in jamhooriat, must fend for themselves. Thar is only an exhibit of this irony. Want to know more why democracy is stunted; why 79 per cent of the people of Pakistan still think the army is more trustworthy than the politicians? It may only be a case of minor relativity, and institutions, from one-to-all, are all steeped in decay. But it sure is why the poor people of Thar are dying of starvation, disease and deprivation. Without much attributable to Bilawal alone, though, the festivities at the Sindh Festival were the closest to, ‘a Nero-playing-the-lyre even as Rome burned’.

What is the first local lesson in politics that the octogenarian Qaim Ali Shah must have rendered to Bilawal as he assumed the mantle of the dynastic heir in the PPP? ‘Saaeen, if we do too much too soon for these people who touch your heart, and fill their bellies with their needs, they will not have a need for which to look up to us. They could then go their different ways; even dream a change under someone as foreign as an Imran Khan.’ The same lesson that ZAB learnt and BB played around with. Else, in a party of the common man, the hari, the kissan and the mazdoor, men and children need not die worse than the fate that befalls an animal.

It is time for Bilawal to define himself and his politics. He could follow the saaeens of the fore and continue this degenerative trend; or, given his youthful energy and an idealism that he is sure to have imbibed in the creative culture of Oxford, follow his dream. He can stick to his dynastic profession of politics but become the game-changer; force others to change their way of ruling the people, and make politics into the public service that it is meant to be.

There are two aspects to this malady of Thar: one is a governance failure; and second is the administrative dysfunction. Both are now entrenched parts of how this state functions, all across; luckily, remedies are available to both. Governance is attitudinal in nature; political leaders can correct that. Administration is a demand-and-supply phenomenon. Again, the key is with the political leadership. On corruption, there are past masters around him, who could help him gradually wean a system towards greater fidelity. Meanwhile, Tharis continue to populate their graveyards.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 22^nd, 2014.

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