Hating PPP : Revisiting Mehrangate

The national media is revisiting Mehrangate, involving bribes paid by the ISI under the then army chief, General Aslam Beg, in 1990 for the creation of the Islami Jamhoori Ittehad (IJI) to foreclose the possibility of the PPP again coming to power after its dismissal by President Ghulam Ishaq Khan.

What has triggered this new media interest in Mehrangate is the latest statement by the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Justice (Retd) Saeeduzzaman Siddiqi that no one among the recipient politicians had denied receiving the bribe. The debate has also been given a fillip by revelations made by the ex-ISI officer and ex-IB chief, Imtiaz Ahmad, about how the army had interfered in, and damaged, the democratic process in Pakistan. The whole affair started when the PPP’s General (Retd) Naseerullah Babar told the National Assembly in 1994 how the ISI had disbursed funds among politicians to manipulate the 1990 elections, form the IJI, and bring about the defeat of the PPP. At the summit of power, President Ghulam Ishaq Khan was providing the legal cover. It is his name which was mentioned at the Supreme Court as the Chief Executive who ordered the disbursement. In 1996, Air Marshal Asghar Khan petitioned the Supreme Court against ex-army chief General Mirza Aslam Beg, ex-ISI chief Lt General Asad Durrani, and Younus Habib of Habib Bank and then Mehran Bank, concerning “the criminal distribution of the people’s money for political purposes”. When the Supreme Court proceeded with the case General Asad Durrani submitted the famous affidavit containing names of the “recipients”. That list is now being brandished on TV channels. From the “best prime minister”, the “best leader of a religious party” to the “most popular political leader in the country”, everyone figures on it.

In some cases the sums are so small that it seems ridiculous that our politicians can sell themselves so cheaply. Why should the generals stay put if the lure of “interference” is uncontested by any social and moral restraint? The generals already had power and made money; the politicians wanted power to make money.

Writing in Daily Times (January 22, 2006) columnist Ardeshir Cowasjee revealed a large number of disbursements made from Mehran Bank to General Aslam Beg and his organisation FRIENDS. This was actually a bank account sheet provided to the Court during its initial hearings by General Naseerullah Babar. It also included the fee General Beg had to pay to the lawyer who defended him in a case of contempt against the Supreme Court earlier. Brigadier (Retd) Imtiaz Ahmad has confessed on a TV channel to having hated the PPP on the basis of his institution’s sense of “national security”. Ms Benazir Bhutto has already revealed in her memoirs how she was not allowed to rule under the Constitution and how General Beg had warned her away from Afghanistan and India policies handled by the army through the ISI. (Extrapolating from the de facto situation, Justice (Retd) Siddiqi was compelled to say on Wednesday that the ISI was a military organisation which should be separated from the civilian government.)

The Mehrangate case is still pending at the Supreme Court. The revelations are tonic for us today as we confront the task of understanding what Pakistan has become over the years. But the TV channels too must draw correct lessons from the information being regurgitated. Is the PPP still a “hated” party?

Political accountability is an imperative that the PPP must submit to at all times, but “hatred” of the PPP is not a fair emotion on the basis of which to judge an elected government.

Aslam Beg is still good for sound bytes if the PPP has to be pilloried for being an American or Indian “lackey”. Quoted in Nawa-e-Waqt (August 24, 2009) Gen Aslam Beg said that America used Gen Musharraf against the Taliban, later it bought Baitullah Mehsud, Sufi Muhammad and Ajmal Kasab to fulfil its designs in the region. Is this a fair comment to publish?

During a discussion on a TV channel about his handling of Pakistan’s nuclear programme, he defiantly advocated the policy of “outsourcing” the programme. With the passage of time, this mismatch between the thinking of our retired top brass and the survival of the state is becoming clear. We should be careful what lessons we draw from the Mehrangate scandal.

Swat : Extrajudicial killings Of Taliban

On Sunday (2 August 2009 ) morning, a body, hands bound with rope and shot in the back of the head, lay on the sidewalk of a main road. A note pinned to the shirt and written in Urdu gave the victim’s, Gul Khitab, and said he was from Matta, one of the remaining Taliban strongholds. “Enemy of Swat,” it read.

Now it has become routine for many Swat residents to see unclaimed bodies dumped in agricultural fields, by the roadside or on the banks of Swat River. Like the Taliban before them, the executioners had left handwritten messages with the bodies warning that this would be the fate of militants. In their heyday, the Swat Taliban did exactly the same things, executing, and sometimes beheading their rivals, soldiers and policemen in their custody.

According to details, 22 dead bodies were found on Monday evening and Tuesday. How these people, yet to be recognized, were killed and who were the assassins, continued to be a mystery. During the last couple of months up to 120 dead bodies were found in Swat but no one has accepted the responsibility of killings as yet.

While the security forces have been insisting that a majority of the dead bodies belonged to fleeing terrorists who were killed by the enraged locals, sources said the bodies recovered on Monday and Tuesday were mostly found from the areas where the security forces are conducting operation for the last thee days. This is also giving rise to the speculations of the Swatis about the extra judicial killings in the region.

The commissioner Malakand while reiterating his previous stance that the security forces had nothing to do with the mysterious killings, said he had no knowledge of the fresh killings saying he was away from the headquarters. However, the government is yet to come up with a clear stance in this regard. The commissioner said he had recommended to provincial government to conduct inquiry about these killings.

Witnesses said most of the victims had been shot, some several times. They were blindfolded with their hands tied behind their backs, and dumped in fields or alleys.

“Previously we were afraid of the Taliban. Now, we’re afraid of the army,” one man told the Associated Press news agency.

Military officials have confirmed that the army has been conducting operations in areas where the bodies have been found.

Jaswant Jinnah : In Search Of An Anti-Nehru

ASHOK MALIK
Senior Journalist

IN LITERATURE, myth, politics and perception, the principal faultlines of Partition have always been the ones that divided Punjab and Bengal. It is easy to forget that the Great Separation of 1947 also split Sindh from Kutch and contemporary Rajasthan, drawing, almost literally, a line in the sand.

The BJP descended from a party founded by a Bengali and initially dropped anchor among Punjabi refugee communities in Delhi. It is some irony then that the two BJP veterans who have produced revisionist accounts of Partition in recent years speak from (or for) either side of the Sindh- Rajputana/Kutch frontier.

LK Advani’s June 2005 family visit to Karachi is famous. Accompanied by a team of selected journalists, advised by three adventurous confidants and disregarding the counsel of at least two senior diplomats, Advani travelled to Pakistan, to the Jinnah Memorial and to his childhood. He was so emotionally influenced as to throw off his sobriety and enter into a Sindhi folk dance routine wearing a flamboyant red cap. It was a captivating journey, but one that crippled Advani politically.

Jaswant Singh’s remembrance of Partition came in a different form. In the evocative opening chapter of his memoir, A Call to Honour (2006), he wrote movingly of his maternal grandfather, Thakur Mool Singhji of Khuri – “a tall, imposing presence, big of bone, full beard, gruff voice, an example of desert manhood, epitomising the values of this harsh, hard, desiccated, incomparably beautiful land,” patriarch of a Hindu-Muslim community that stretched well into Sindh.

Then came Partition: “What in living memory or history (for even the topography of the land was not different) had not been alien territory suddenly got labelled so. We were divided by time, by circumstance and by events and forces way beyond my grandfather’s world.” Both experiences are touching. It can be argued, of course, that a million refugee or Partition- affected families can recount two million such stories, many more tragic and emotionally wrenching.

Also, despite the melodrama, the fact is Advani and Jaswant were among the luckier ones. The refugee from Karachi came to India on a BOAC flight, not, like countless others, on foot, on a cart or on the roof of an overcrowded train. The grandson of Khuri was at Mayo College on August 15, 1947, living as sheltered a life as could be. Whether it is the relative detachment of the hour or the distance of time, Advani and Jaswant have both sought to re- imagine Partition using the same prism: the life and words of Mohammed Ali Jinnah.
Whose hero? Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohammed Ali Jinnah

Advani’s Jinnah and Jaswant’s Jinnah are equally unacceptable to the BJP – and to a the larger body of public opinion in India, irrespective of voting preference. Yet, it is crucial to recognise the two Jinnahs are not always identical.

Advani’s Jinnah was born of a twisted reading of Indian politics. As far back as the 2004 election campaign, Advani had begun to believe – or had been so convinced by some intellectual weathercocks – that Muslim voters were flocking to the BJP. That they would not make the same mistake they did in the 1940s when they deserted the “Hindu” Congress for the Muslim League. As the inheritor of the Congress’ pan-nationalist robustness, the BJP would now win the trust of the Muslim electorate. It was engaging nonsense, good enough for the odd op-ed article but clearly far from real-life politics. The point is, Advani bought the line. A mix of political desperation, individual ambition and the addled nostalgia that inevitably accompanies anecdotage confused him.

Advani was convinced that an India-Pakistan rapprochement was essential for resolving Hindu-Muslim tensions in India and for making the BJP more acceptable to electorally hostile segments as well as reinventing himself as a moderate, Vajpayee-style leader acceptable to a broader constituency. This was not hard politics; it was a soft head at work.

The mechanism Advani chose to fulfil his complex aspiration was appropriating Jinnah. In presenting him as the mascot of Hindu-Muslim unity – which he was in the first quarter of the 20th century – and cheering his speech to the Pakistani Constituent Assembly on August 11, 1947, in which Jinnah foresaw a Muslim nation but a secular state, with freedom of worship for minorities, Advani felt he could use the Quaid-e-Azam’s words to persuade one section and his religious identity to court another.

As a political gambit, it was always a non-starter.

How would one classify Jaswant’s Jinnah, the subject of a new biography subtitled “India-Partition Independence”? Is this an Advani me-too? Is it contrariaism for the sake of contrarianism, an uncritical absorption of the ideas of Ayesha Jalal or the unquenched desire to be recognised as the thinking man’s politician? These elements play a part but, above all, Jaswant’s Jinnah is personal. In his book, he paints his hero as a wronged, misunderstood patrician. Is that Jaswant’s self-image?

At the height of his “nationalist” phase, Jinnah was an auxiliary of Bombay’s westernised public intellectuals – Gopal Krishna Gokhale, the Congress Moderates and the Parsi constitutionalists. These groups, along with the Banglo-Indians in Calcutta, comprised the early, pre-Gandhi Indian elites.

The Mahatma’s mass politics, his shifting of the locus of the Congress from the lawyers’ chambers of Bombay to the heat and dust of rural Gujarat, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, unnerved these elites. They lost control of the Congress and moved in other directions. Some ended up as Communists, some in the Hindu Mahasabha; Jinnah ended up with Pakistan.

Despite his long innings, Jaswant has had a similarly alien relationship with the BJP’s mobilisation techniques. As he puts it in the book: “His whole persona was of a self-contained reserved man who worked on reason, clarity of thought, and by the incisiveness of his expression. As long as politics was consultative, his position was not to be questioned. With increasing politicisation, democratisation and the trend becoming more participatory… Jinnah lost his inclusive, all-India platform.”

This left Jaswant’s protagonist with a compelling dilemma: “How to straddle the national scene without there being any province wholly behind him?” The MP from Darjeeling is writing of Jinnah; he may as well have been talking of himself.

In the end, however, Jaswant’s Jinnah and Advani’s Jinnah are united by one quest: the search for the anti-Nehru. Neither BJP senior citizen has the courage to say it trenchantly but their exploration of a non-Nehruvian source of the idea of Indian nationhood was what drove them to Jinnah.

WHO WERE THE other candidates? A Savarkar or a Golwalkar would appeal only to the initiated. A Rajaji, a constitutional conservative who advocated a free market, had his limitations for two men not intrinsically comfortable with economic policy and not seeing it as central to their identity. Patel had his uses but these were limited to attempts at borrowing his “Iron Man” armour and no-nonsense approach to internal security.
None of these was useful to win incremental supporters or applause from liberal intellectuals. That would come only from painting Jinnah in sympathetic colours and the Muslim as Partition’s victim rather than its anti-hero.

When historical interpretation is reduced to such exigencies, the upshot is downright bizarre. In his Jinnah biography, Jaswant quotes American academic Lloyd Rudolph as telling him: “A multinational state… shares sovereignty among a variety of actors. India’s federal system, particularly its linguistic states, is a manifestation of a multinational state that shares and bargains about sovereignty. Similarly, reservations for SCs, STs and even for OBCs, as well as the 73rd amendment’s creation of third tier of local government [panchayati raj] are [all] manifestations of sharing and bargaining about sovereignty in a multinational state. These developments are consistent with the kind of bargaining strategy that Jinnah adopted.”

Jaswant expects us to believe this was the sort of harmless, textbook federalism Nehru and Patel denied poor Jinnah and forced him into demanding a separate nation. Indians may buy his book, but not too many will buy Jaswant’s thesis. His Jinnah, like Advani’s, is fantasy.

Article 6 ; High Treason…

6. High treason. (1) Any person who abrogates or attempts or conspires to abrogate, subverts or attempts or conspires to subvert the Constitution by use of force or show of force or by other unconstitutional means shall be guilty of high treason.
(2) Any person aiding or abetting the acts mentioned in clause (1) shall likewise be guilty of high treason.
(3) [5] [Majlis-e-Shoora (Parliament)] shall by law provide for the punishment of persons found guilty of high treason.

Violance : Our National Characteristics

We really felt embarrassed on the events happened at Gujra or any such events anywhere in Pakistan….
But one tthing I wanna mention (as I think so)
is that Gujra events cannot be tagged (only)under the slogan of discrimination with Maseehee brothers…The main behaviour behind it is the violant,extremists tendancies and sensationalism reagrding religious issues…As on the next day a factory owner and member of Tablighi Jamaat is also killed under the same charges….
Violant tendancies have unfortunately become our national characteristics…
I think peoples of Swat and the brothers of Maseehee community,Ehle Tashee and Ahmadiya Community have the same issues in this Country…
Plz dont alienate Maseehee Community from the aggrieved nation of Pakistan….
Here I remembered a video clip of rebuttal to Musharraf from an Indian muslim when he sympathised with them in his lecture.