Musharraf’s Republic, hailed by the English-speaking chattering classes as the beginning of a brave new world, now betrays every sign of being stranded in a morass of boredom and predictability. Nothing so highlights the predictable as the just-concluded local elections. The overriding lesson to be drawn from them: we are stuck with the general, stuck with the Chaudries and stuck with the Q League. There’s no breaking the collective stranglehold of all three on the nation’s windpipe, not with the kind of opposition we have.

So elated is the generalissimo with the local election results that he has handed out certificates of ‘moderation’ to all the establishment-backed winners: MQM and Arbab Rahim in Sindh, the ubiquitous Chaudries in Punjab. If this be the face of Pakistani moderation, extremism begins to look like a better alternative.

We’ve had fixed elections before but in this era of enlightened moderation we have entered new territory altogether. The glorious referendum of 2002 when angels stuffed ballot boxes, the general elections the same year which gave a whole new meaning to the concept of shifting goalposts, and now these local elections in which the important thing was not how you voted but how your votes were counted.

Never mind that Gen Musharraf has a hard time initiating a dialogue with his own people, as a sign of enlightened moderation he is going to initiate a dialogue with Zionism by addressing the World Jewish Congress in New York. Musharraf apologists are already getting breathless in hailing this as a trail-blazing achievement. The Musharraf agenda becomes clearer: fix elections at home and curry favour with the Yanks abroad even if this involves something as totally irrelevant to Pakistan as addressing the World Jewish Congress. Nice idea talking to world Jewry but it wouldn’t hurt if the president first tried to talk to the people of Pakistan. Q League president Ch Shujaat Hussain, however, gets it about right when he calls for “promotion of mysticism to eliminate extremism in the society”. Logic or reason being of little use in trying to make sense of Pakistani politics, mysticism should stand a better chance. Why not try the occult a bit later?

One Churchill was good enough for Britain. At the end of World War II, the Britishers kicked him out in the 1945 election. One de Gaulle was enough for France and when he had been at the helm for about 10 years, the French were not too sorry to see him go. You get tired of even the best. This would be a truism anywhere else but not in Pakistan where a cure for the man-of-destiny affliction has yet to be discovered. The hard part is that they want to be around forever.

Musharraf is the fourth saviour or man of destiny Pakistan has had to endure. What if General Headquarters were to dabble in amateur theatre? Chances are the outcome would be hilarious, players coming on stage and then showing not the slightest inclination of leaving and making way for anyone else after they had delivered their lines. Imagine the plight of the audience.

Ayaz, a columnist for Dawn, writes for THT from Islamabad