Of Think Tanks and Stink Tanks
I DO NOT know what the heck is going on up there in Islamabad . What is this between the Prime Minister and the President ? Who has stepped on whose toes? Have the two fallen out with each other?
Is the crisis real or is the press making too much of it? If there is a fight, what are they fighting for? What high moral principles are involved? Sitting here in the middle of a polluted industrial slum (which my employers insist is a 'suburb'), I really haven't got a clue.
Other countries have think tanks. We have stink tanks and the lids are off and we, the ignorant of the press, are doing our bit to make the air stink some more. Politics in our country is like a tannery, and we are its industrial waste. It is as if all of us are living in that wonderful resort, Kasur .
I tell you, it makes me mad, stark raving mad. If there are differences between the president and the Prime Minister , why don't they take me into confidence? Does a voter count for nothing in this country?
I read somewhere that Governor -General Ghulam Muhammad dismissed Khawaja Nizamuddin because among other things, the latter had called a Governor's conference to discuss the situation arising out of the anti-Qadiani riots in the Punjab . The Governor-General protested that he should have been told beforehand. But now that the Governors had been invited, he would preside over the conference.
Prime Minister Nazimuddin insisted that since he had called the conference, he would preside over it. Ghulam Muhammad then said, "All right, but the meeting will be held at the Governor -General 's house and it will be presided over by you but I will be present."
So the Governors came and discussed the Punjab situation. Soon afterwards, the Governor -General called a Cabinet meeting and told the worthies present that they were not working as a team and things, and would they please resign. When someone (probably the Prime Minister himself or Sardar Abdur Rab Nishtar) reminded him that since only a few days ago, the constituent Assembly had passed the federal budget and thus reposed its confidence in the Leader of the House, there was no cause for the cabinet to resign, Ghulam Muhammad dismissed the Nazimuddin Ministry forty years ago to the day, or almost. He had sown the seed, which was to grow into Bangladesh less than twenty years later.
In his own mad estimation, Ghulam Muhammad must have acted in the highest national interest like Iskander Mirza and Ayub Khan and Yahya Khan and Bhutto and Zia-ul-Haq and now Ghulam Ishaq Khan who has already socked one Prime Minister and is about to give marching orders to another. Or so they say.
What manner of people are we? Especially our politicians? They have been at each other's throat for forty years and more and refuse to learn from their blunders. Supposing, God forbid, Mr. Nawaz Sharif does go; will angels descend from heaven to cure our political derangement? Why things are kept from us, the people? Why must politics be played outside Parliament ? Why this entire palace infringe? Elected governments, selected governments and self-appointed governments, have all been booted out, never voted out. The people have never been told why.
I have cited the Nizamuddin-Ghulam Muhammad affair to show that men in authority can be as mean and petty as the former Governor -General . What was his quarrel with Khawaja Nizamuddin , one of the most respected if not the most astute Prime Minister in our history? Whenever Governor-General and President and CMLA-Presidents have dismissed prime ministers, they have given the same reasons that the man (or woman) shunted out was corrupt, incompetent, and that the law and order situation was so grave that it had imperilled national integrity. The situation was so alarming that Nizamuddin, Bhutto , Mohammad Khan Junejo , Mrs. Bhutto , et. al. had to go. And the promise? "I, the god-man, the king-priest will take you, the people (who aren't worth a damn) to safety."
It has been like this all my born days. As H. L. Mencken puts it: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." This has worked better in Pakistan than anywhere else in the world. But I am an optimist. One day, our rulers will have no hobgoblin left to invent. After all, there is a limit to human ingenuity and chicanery and plain cussedness.
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THE 15th Editor of the Economist , London , Mr. Rupert Pennant-Rea left the 150-years old paper on March 27 after doing a seven-year stint. In a farewell editorial, he reviews the events that changed the world from 1986 to-date. They need not be recapitulated here but some excerpts would be in order.
What journalists do crucially affects the outcome of the incestuous relations between politicians and lobbyists.
To attack the virus (protectionism) will require brave politicians backed by vigilant journalists. More accurately, it will require vigilant journalists shaming the politicians into bravery.
The task of the Economists . . . is to apply its principles to a wide range of issues and events, not just to restate them. Even if its philosophy is timeless, it must always be a paper of its time. It must be full of the sap of reality; reduce it to a husk of theory and it would die. It should mostly be serious; it should never be solemn. Above all, it should be independent-and, thanks to its complicated constitution of checks and balances, it is. During my seven years as Editor, I (and no doubt all my colleagues) received countless exhortations to write about this subject or that, to take this view or that, " . . . but not once did pressure come from the shareholders or directors of this company. What we wrote was what we, the journalists, chose to write. Few other publications are so lucky ," (emphasis added). Lucky Mr. Pennant-Rea and lucky Economist .
Friday, April 2, 1993
