President General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan has had the last but one laugh. The voting for his re-election as the President, while continuing to hold additional charge as the Chief of the Army Staff (COAS), by the outgoing National Assembly was completed on October 6, 2007, and the Election Commission has unofficially indicated that he has "swept" the engineered poll, with his two opponents getting only three votes between them. Presuming that the two must have voted for each other, the only interesting question is who was the third person who voted againstMusharraf.
Only wishful-thinking Pakistani analysts and ill-informed Indian analysts were looking for excitement from the election. Right from the day the Supreme Court refrained from intervening to prevent the illegal deportation of Nawaz Sharif, former Prime Minister and a sworn enemy of Musharraf, to Saudi Arabia, and from the way the proceedings of the court while hearing arguments on the petitions challenging Musharraf's right to seek re-election were going on, it must have been clear to any objective analyst that the Court, while continuing to question the arbitrariness of individual acts of Musharraf as the President, is reluctant to question the legitimacy of his holding office and seeking re-election as the President of Pakistan.
The results of the Presidential election have not yet been officially declared because the court has ordered that no official declaration should be made till it pronounced its final judgement on the constitutionality of the special law, which permitted Musharraf to hold two offices as the President and the COAS. The arguments on the substantive issues are expected to resume before the court from October17, 2007, after the Ramzan fasting period is over. The court rejected requests from the petitioners to order the postponement of the elections till it pronounced its judgement on the substantiveissues. This is another indicator that the court does not want to open a legal Pandora's Box by questioning the legitimacy of Musharraf holding office as the President and theCOAS.
The lawyers and many media personnel continue to be in the forefront of the anti-Musharraf campaign. The public itself is showing signs of fatigue after seeing the way the principal politicalleaders--particularly Mrs Benazir Bhutto-- have conducted themselves as if what matters is their personal interests and not the national interests. The problem in the Pakistani political landscape is that the people do not have much of a choice. Neither Gen.Musharraf norMr Nawaz Sharif nor Mr Shujat Hussain nor Mrs Bhutto excites them. They are stale leaders with self-interests, but no political vision. The choice before the people is not between a devil and a saint, but among four devils. One should not be surprised if they conclude that it hardly matters who is in power.
The rotten state of politics in Pakistan would be evident from the fact that for the last one month or so these four leaders have been so preoccupied playing their political games that they have not even noticed that the situation in the tribal areas in the Pashtun belt has been going from bad to worse due to the activities of a welter of jihadi terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), the Islamic Jihad Group, which is another Uzbek organisationn allied to Al Qaeda, the followers of Baitullah Mehsud of South Waziristan and Maulana FM radio Fazlullah in Swat, the various local Taliban groups and individual citizen jihadis called Jundullahs or Soldiers of Allah.
There has been no sense of shock in the political circles that the followers of Baitullah Mehsud have captured nearly 300 members of the Pakistani para-military forces such as the Frontier Constabulary and have been holding them hostage for over a month, demanding the release of some followers of Baitullah, who are in Government custody. The followers of Baitullah have already beheaded three of the captured personnel and are threatening to behead three every day till their demands are conceded. There has been no sense of outrage in the politicalclass--either in the ruling circles or in the opposition-- over what has been happening. No demand that the Government should do something to free the captured security forces personnel. The fact that all the captured personnel are themselves tribals from the Pashtun belt partly explains the indifference in the rest of thecountry--particularly in the Army's GHQ-- to their fate. If, instead of capturing these tribals of thepara-military units-- Baitullah's followers had captured some Punjabi soldiers of the Army, the reactions in the rest of the country might have been different.
Musharraf has not had the time to visit the affected areas and reassure the personnel of the para-military forces that he would do everything in his power to rescue those captured and crush the jihadis. He is issuing all his statements from Islamabad. NeitherMrs Benazir nor Mr Nawaz Sharif nor Mr Shaukat Aziz, the Prime Minister, norMr Shujjat Hussain has had the time to preoccupy themselves with the fate of the captured personnel and to meet their relatives. In the meanwhile, the Lal Masjid of Islamabad, which has been re-opened on the orders of the Supreme Court, is back in the jihadi business.
If this state of affairs continues, what might ultimately prevail are not the judgements of the judiciary, but the fatwas of these jihadis, who are issuing fatwas calling for attacks against somebody or the other. The latest fatwa of Baitullah Mehsud is againstMrs Benazir Bhutto.
If this continues, there is a real danger that the last laugh in the on-going Greek tragedy in Pakistan will be not of Musharraf, but of Osama bin Laden or his Pakistani surrogates.
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B. Raman is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai.
