Ayaz Amir

The crisis centred in Dera Bugti—thanks to Islamabad maladroitness, on the verge of becoming the most famous place-name in the country—is not about gas royalties, writ of the state, the unfortunate Dr Shazia, or even the new coinage being promoted in Islamabad, warlordism. When you cut through the hype and inflamed verbiage, it is about something as old as the state of Pakistan itself: arbitrariness, adhocism and our strange inability to master the bare essentials of constitutionalism. If Nawab Muhammad Akbar Khan, chief of the Bugti tribe, one of Balochistan’s largest, is a warlord—which he isn’t—has it not been Pakistan’s luck to be run and, if the truth is told, mis-run by a succession of warlords?

What were Ayub Khan, Yahya or, for that matter, Zia-ul-Haq? All warlords risen to power through the barrel of the gun, and therefore without legitimacy or constitutional sanction to do what they did to this country. When we get constitutionalism, as per that most abused document in Pakistan’s history, the 1973 Constitution, we can then take the constitutional mantle and fit it to other situations. Writ of the state...there’s no such thing in the abstract. To mean anything, ‘writ of the state’ must be constitutional, that is, rooted in law. Not rooted that way becomes a cover for arbitrariness and adhocism.

You know what’s one of the handiest clauses in the penal code? Resisting or interfering with due process of authority. You get into an argument with a thanedar (police official) and soon enough he’ll threaten you with this section. What was the army doing in East Pakistan in 1970-71? Establishing the writ of the state. We know where that got us. The wages of adhocism: this is what you get when institutions become irrelevant, democracy becomes a pantomime, constitutionalism is mocked, and the business of government, all its complexity and subtlety, is reduced to the whims and vagaries of one-man rule. Musharraf is a nice person. That’s the general opinion. But so were Zia and Yahya and Ayub.

Is the spirit presiding over Pakistan’s destiny immune to the lessons of history? I have been just been reading Brigadier A. R. Siddiqi’s ‘East Pakistan, The Endgame’, a fascinating, near-ringside account of the follies which led to the breakup of Pakistan. Uncannily, it is also a mirror to our present condition. Endless repetitions of the same historical cycle, the torch of infallibility handed down from one set of ambitious generals to another, politicians collaborating, or not speaking up, or not speaking loud enough, the ordinary people of Pakistan picking up the bill in the shape of suffering the consequences. According to Siddiqi’s account, Roedad Khan, then Yahya Khan’s information secretary, was an unabashed hawk, supporting tough action against the Bengalis. This man who was ecstatic when Musharraf seized power now gives extended lectures on democracy through newspaper articles. East Pakistan is over and done with but its lessons remain. In East Pakistan the crop of generals we had, guardians of national ideology, thought they knew it all. Our present generals too think they have all the answers. That’s one disturbing link with the past. The other: the politicians of that generation proved a spineless lot; the ones now on offer, from maulanas to mainstream politicos, look no better than a pack of jokers.

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