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| Ominous forebodings |
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| Evidently, the general's emergency juggernaut has brought him no pacification here at home or abroad. Instead, it has stirred up more dust that could potentially snowball into a furious storm. Despite his administration's clenched-fisted crackdown, mass arrests of civil society activists, political leaders and workers, and the house confinement of the superior judiciary's defiant judges, out in protest all over the country on Monday were lawyers, on whom the administration unleashed its hounds to beat the living daylights out of them. Some had their heads broken at the plainclothes' hands, some had their hair pulled, and some were dragged on the ground from their neckties in an abysmally contemptible show of the brutal use of state power.
The general seems to have defied learning from our own history that once the lid is blown up on a people's pent-up sentiments, that often leads up to major upheavals and culminates into unimagined consequences. If transiently some calm follows, that at best has always been a lull before the storm. Smouldering fires inevitably flare up into a conflagration to engulf the top, as it happened to Ayub Khan and later to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. A Rawalpindi students protest over their college mate's road death triggered off a countrywide agitation, as the masses disenchanted with iniquitous distribution of national wealth and widening income disparities stormed out on the streets, precipitating a convulsion that ended up in Ayub's ouster. And a poll-rigging charge instigated the masses to come out against Bhutto, no lesser for their own anger over his failure to deliver on his promise of roti, kapra and makan to them. The agitation caused his ejection from office and a military takeover, as it happened to Ayub's eviction.
Notably, Ayub had pummeled the political opposition into a nonentity and smitten dissent into obliteration, as had Bhutto too in his own way. Both had suffocatingly muzzled independent print media and turned the state-owned newspapers and electronic networks into servile tools of their personal projection. And they had no private channels to contend with. Yet none of all this rescued them when the crunch fell them. The people's outburst was spontaneous that gathered momentum on its own breath. The propellant in both instances was a raging public discontent and despondency. And it is this that the general must fret about. Not the curbing of independent print and electronic media, which would only bring him a baneful whispering campaign that would do him more harm as it this Monday when a rumour of his ouster in a military coup sent the Karachi Stock Exchange tumbling down to register a record slump.
The general may have given a tremendous push-up to the economy. But the masses are wailing that this has brought no relief whatsoever to their unenviable lives and that their miseries are multiplying by leaps and bounds with every passing day. Nor has cut any ice with them his accusation that the others are to blame for the terrorism's spurt in the country as in the popular eye he is held squarely responsible for it because of his playing second fiddle to America's war on terrorism. By every reckoning, his explanations for the imposition of emergency have fallen flat on public ears and the people's reaction to his extra-constitutional measure is overwhelmingly adverse.
Even externally, the initial world reaction of "concern" and "disappointment" has begun turning into censure and condemnation. His humble appeal to the western powers to understand the measure in the context of our peculiar conditions seems beginning to wear thin. Powerful voices from crucial western capitals, including Washington, London and Brussels, are now streaming in vigorously, urging him to doff his uniform on November 15 and hold the general election by January as scheduled. Even President Bush has now said so in so many words publicly. Threats are also emanating from America and Europe that their aid to Pakistan may be at peril if he doesn't do away with this emergency juggernaut quickly and move forward to restore democracy and civilian rule to the country as had he pledged.
In short, the general's emergency foray has become untenable, and even very dangerous. Internally, it is fraught with risks of all manner, including upheavals of unpredictable consequences. Externally, it holds up the potent possibility of Pakistan becoming a pariah like Myanmar in the international community. In the greater national interests, the general would do well to rethink his enterprise and reverse the course right now. Tomorrow will be too late. |
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