Seriously Sandeep

Two views on the Musharraf Emergency. Diametrically divergent. One based on facts, the other based on bias and concealed facts and symptoms.

In his two part series (the third part is in the pipeline), Arun Shourie, nails Musharraff’s farce of "saving democracy" in Pakistan. I’ll leave you to read the longish articles, but a small observation first. One of the reasons I admire this article is its candour of stating–rather, restating what the Indian establishment and media have forgotten.

We must never sacrifice a national interest in the delusion that someone is the ‘best bet’ — he will soon be gone, and our interest would have been sacrificed in perpetuity. Nor should we ever sacrifice an interest in the delusion that doing so will assuage that ruler,country or ‘movement’.

In other words, we are playing the game by the rules Pakistan has set. I have selected Prem Shankar Jha’s piece on the same event as one of the better examples to illustrate this. His article is manifestly titled Saviour Musharraf! The obvious question follow: saviour of what or who? According to Jha, it is Pakistan’s democracy, which in reality is a dictatorship within a dictatorship.

Jha justifies the Emergency on flimsy and sometimes, misleading grounds.

This ’Emergency’ is as different from previous military takeovers as chalk from cheese. It has been declared not to cement the alliance with the mullahs but to enable the state to fight them. Since July 15, Pakistan has been in the grip of a civil war. It is facing an uprising of fanatical Islamist elements in the Northwest that has already taken 2,514 lives this year. Of these, 1,800 have died in just 103 days since July 15, when the Taliban formally resiled from the Miranshah agreement of September 5, 2006, and Aymanal-Zawahiri put a price on Musharraf’s head. Of these, almost 600 have been soldiers and members of the Pakistan Frontier Constabulary. That is a rate of killing in a low intensity conflict that the Indian armed forces have never had to face.

But what is far worse, this civil war is spreading at disconcerting speed from Waziristan and the tribal border belt to settled areas such as Swat, Malakand, Upper Dir and parts of the North West Frontier Province. Militarised mullahs are raising their heads in more and more places, boasting private armies,swearing to wreak vengeance on Musharraf, and thumbing their noses at civilian authority. Musharraf is trying to fight this metastasis of fanaticism, but he is doing so with one hand tied behind his back.

Arun Shourie’s article convincingly shows that these are disastrous results of Mushrraf’s brand of politics. It is incomprehensible how Jha is able to drum up sympathy for the dictator in face of such facts. Next, and predictably, he blames the US for Musharraf’s current predicament.

The origins of this civil war lie in Pakistan’s involvement in the US’ unending, goal-less war in Afghanistan, the rising death toll among civilians and increasingly the US (and increasingly Pakistan) army’s remote-control method of fighting the war—a method that does not distinguish between combatants and civilians.

And then the final defence of the Emergency: strangle the Constitution to save it.

…but the fight he is fighting, therefore, is not to kill democracy but to save it. For democracy can only flourish when there is a strong civil society upon which its institutions can rely on for support and replenishment.

A recent event that shows the General’s commitment to democracy: unceremonious removal of Justice Chaudary (not the Jeetendra movie). Besides, Jha doesn’t give us instances of Musharraf’s efforts to build a strong civil society during his long tenure. Jha’s defence of the Emergency is reminiscent of the days when sections of the Indian media defended Indira Gandhi’s murder of democracy. Khushwant Singh comes to mind at once. Jha further writes that democracy in Pakistan has been struggling to be born "ever since independence." The reason for that lies in Pakistan’s founding roots.

Pakistan having declared itself to be an ‘Islamic state’, the‘moderates’ on whom the West rests its hopes, as do the wishful in India, just cannot stand up to the mullahs: the latter have to merely keep reciting verses from the Quran and repeating hadis; they have merely to ask, as they do at every turn, “if the object was to establish Pakistan as a secular state, as a state indifferent to Islam,as one in which not the shariah but some alien law shall rule, what was the point of creating Pakistan, what was the point of partitioning India?” “How can preaching religion be terrorism?” they demand.

To my mind, Pakistan is a different version of Saudi Arabia having a barely functioning democracy.

The most shameless part of Jha’s piece is the concluding paragraph where he heaps undisguised panegyrics on the UPA.

It is only the Indian government which has taken the statesmanlike position of emphasising the need for stability in Pakistan. This is because it is one of the few governments in the world that understands the crisis that the Pakistani state is facing.

You can argue that Shourie represents the Indian "Right" and Jha the Left/secular crowd and they obviously have their biases. That line is irrelevant here because Jha’s vile pen is bluffing on fragile grounds. I fail to understand why Jha is overtly concerned with the General’s predicament, or whatever he calls it. He should have rather focussed on India’s National Interest, not Musharraf’s.